Disability rights advocates gather Feb. 26 at the Arizona Capitol in Phoenix to urge Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and Republican legislative leaders to remedy a funding shortfall in the state’s Division of Developmental Disabilities. Photo by Caitlin Sievers | Arizona Mirror
House Republicans on Monday finally announced their plan to ensure that Arizona’s Division of Developmental Disabilities can pay its bills next month.
The $122 million supplemental spending proposal should get DDD, which is expected to run out of money at the end of April, through June 30, the end of the state’s fiscal year.
Advocates for the developmentally disabled community, along with Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and legislative Democrats, have been asking the Republican-controlled legislature to approve supplemental funding for DDD since January.
But since then, Republicans and Democrats have instead traded barbs via letters and statements to the press over who is responsible for the funding gap and how exactly to close it. The GOP’s supplemental funding proposal would prevent a looming disaster for families of the nearly 60,000 Arizonans with disabilities who would lose services if DDD couldn’t pay its providers in May, but it also comes with some tough cuts.
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Legislative Republicans accused Hobbs of financial mismanagement and executive overreach for both increasing payments to Arizona’s Medicaid providers and for significantly expanding the Parents as Paid Caregivers Program after legislators refused to approve specific funding for it last year.
The Parents as Paid Caregivers Program pays parents to provide in-home care to their own children, but only if they require “extraordinary care” above and beyond typical parenting tasks. That might include assisting a teenager who has cerebral palsy, autism or cognitive disabilities with tasks like bathing, dressing and eating. The program was initially entirely federally funded, but beginning this month, the state is on the hook for around one-third of the cost.
The program has expanded over the last year from about 3,000 participants to around 6,000, which came with substantial cost increases, accounting for a large chunk of the $122 million shortfall in the DDD budget.
Brandi Coon, co-founder of the Raising Voices Coalition, which advocates for people with disabilities, told the Arizona Mirror that the proposal that Republicans released on Monday gave advocates something to work with, but also left her with significant concerns.
“They’re trying to balance costs based on people not actually using the services,” she said.
The PPCG program was implemented in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when caregiving service providers couldn’t find enough workers to provide in-home care to people with disabilities. The program instead allowed parents to be paid to provide care for their own children.
Those children would still qualify for Medicaid-funded at-home care even if the Parents as Paid Caregivers Program didn’t exist, there just likely wouldn’t be any workers available to provide that care.
The GOP’s proposal to fix the funding gap, House Bill 2945, would implement a 40-hour weekly cap on PPCG services beginning in July, with a requirement for the state to request permission from the federal government to reduce that cap to 20-hour-per-week by October.
Coon told the Mirror that this portion of the plan was the most concerning to her, and that it seemed to display a lack of understanding for why the Parents as Paid Caregivers Program was created in the first place.
House Speaker Steve Montenegro said in a written statement that after program hours are capped at 20-per week, families can still seek additional care — from outside providers.
“There’s not a workforce that exists in Arizona to assume those care hours,” Coon said.
Many parents who use the program will continue doing the same work to care for their children, with decreased pay and no ability to work outside the home, she added. This will put increased financial and emotional stress on those families, Coon said, and some of them will have to rely on other social services programs like food stamps, to make ends meet.
“For most people having a parent provider is a last resort,” she said. “They had to leave other jobs or careers and already took a pay cut to ensure their child is stable and thriving.”
House Bill 2945, sponsored by Rep. David Livingston, R-Peoria, would also require all current and future Medicaid waivers from the federal government to first be approved by the state legislature.
This change was based on a law implemented last year in Idaho, which resulted in significant confusion about which Medicaid programs could continue without specific approval from the legislature. That law also paved the way for the discontinuation of Idaho’s version of the Parents as Paid Caregivers Program.
Livingston’s proposal would also require all state agencies to report to the legislature how they have used and plan to use any federal funds, and requires approval from the legislature to reauthorize the PPCG program when its approval waiver from the federal government expires in 2027.
To make up the $122 million shortfall, House Bill 2945 would reallocate $38 million from the state’s Housing Trust Fund, $10 million from the Arizona Commerce Authority Competes Fund and $74 million from the Prescription Drug Rebate Fund.
“The Hobbs administration expanded programs in DDD without legislative approval and delayed or ignored key program limitations,” Montenegro said in the statement. “They now want taxpayers to bail them out—without a plan to fix it. Republicans won’t do that. What we’re doing today is stepping up with a responsible, fully funded solution that protects families, restores order, and keeps this from happening again. We’re bringing compassion and common sense back into the process. Families deserve stability—not budget chaos and political excuses.”
To become law, Livingston’s proposal will have to pass through the Republican-controlled Arizona House and Senate, and get a signature from Hobbs, who is not shy about vetoing legislation that doesn’t have Democratic support.
Montenegro didn’t give specifics, but promised that House Republicans would “act swiftly” to pass House Bill 2945 and urged legislative Democrats and the governor to support it.
A spokesman for Hobbs did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether she supported the proposed legislation.
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