On July 21, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who heads Medicaid programs federally, announced they’re deferring over $850 million from the state of California over its Medicaid-funded home and community-based services program called In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS). The Trump administration has attacked IHSS for the program’s growth over the past decade.
Their argument: the program is so successful there must be rampant fraud.
Home and community-based services got started under President Ronald Reagan to help disabled people remain in their communities with the assistance of paid aides, including family members, instead of being institutionalized. From a purely economic standpoint, home and community-based services care is cheaper than care in hospitals or nursing homes. And disabled people find the right to remain in their communities to be so crucial that it has become an essential tenet of disability rights activism.
Hagar Dickman, who directs California-focused long-term services and support at Justice in Aging, told me that disabled people “are entitled to the life that we expect to have of independence, of autonomy, of self-actualization, and agency.”
