California Lawmakers: Protect Our Seniors with Sound Solutions, Not Quick Fixes!
Greg Yu, Esq.
Operations Manager
For the past month, I have been closely monitoring three new bills that our state government is proposing to reduce elder abuse caused by free-lance or unsupervised caregivers. With home care needs in California growing quickly, an increasing number of unsavory opportunists will likely seek out and find jobs as caregivers. These bad actors lack valid experience and often have an unverified or unverifiable criminal record. A number of seniors and convalescing adults have been seriously victimized. Home Sweet Home Care is at the forefront of the movement to see that sensible, workable changes in the law are made because seniors and their safety and welfare remain our top priority.
Just last week, the local San Francisco ABC News affiliate did a feature report on elder abuse and a proposed bill, California Senate Bill 411, Home Care Services Act of 2011 in which hearing we offered written and oral testimony about our disagreements with the bill in its present form: ABC-TV News story, July 20, 2011.
In addition, the California Assembly has proposed AB889, the Domestic Work Employee Equality, Fairness, and Dignity Act which also adds a lot of unnecessary red tape, procedures and costs. If Governor Brown signs either or both of these bills this summer, our State and its many law-abiding full service providers of home care, seniors, their families and caregivers will be in for some very unpleasant, and even, shocking surprises. Already, these two bills are generating as much controversy as the fact of elder abuse itself.
Our State must be careful that new laws do not worsen the problem and make it even harder to locate and pay for affordable, qualified home care for seniors. SB 411 should be blocked because:
1. SB 411 was mostly crafted by a very powerful 90-year old international labor union, whose top priority, quite frankly, is not our State's finances, senior welfare, or home care affordability.
2. The Bill creates a massive public searchable Website ready to display perhaps 100,000 homecare workers statewide by name and certificate number and employer or referred agency. This violates caregivers' privacy concerns and employers' patient confidentiality pledges. Seniors and their families could also face a tangle of misleading or outdated information.
3. The licensing bureaucracy will collect a hefty fee for accreditation and licensing of home care agencies, and force the creation of and payment for a totally new brand of certified training of caregivers. This unnecessarily duplicates and complicates what hundreds of these agencies already do.
4. The Bill will burden law-abiding full-service providers and likely cause seniors to face a vastly-depleted supply of caregivers who may reluctantly choose to join thousands of others in the underground economy rather than pay high annual registration fees and go through additional time-consuming and expensive training.
5. With our state in a deep budgetary crisis, the Bill will easily become another disastrous unfunded mandate, with no money to pay for expensive oversight and enforcement except to further tax the limited savings and income of thousands of seniors in California.
We urge you to help defeat these bills by joining us and our senior clients, their families, and our caregivers to express your concerns and objections to SB 411, in its current form, to your local Assemblyman immediately. Although state legislators are on recess until the key hearings on AB889 and SB411 resume on August 15 and 17, respectively, we urge you to voice your concerns to their legislative staff. Visit http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/yourleg.html. (Calling or faxing in your opposition to the local office or Sacramento office is ideal; mailed letters are not timely enough to be processed.) We need to put truly effective laws in place which home care agency professionals, not just politicians, can agree to.
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
