At-home elder care touted

MIDWAY — Home is not only where the heart is for aging Americans; that is where they are better off and state funds for senior care programs are better spent — six times better at least.

So say Utah senior advocates, government-agency representatives and care providers. They are so sure that promoting independence of individuals is healthier to both seniors and to state coffers that they want a freeze imposed on any public funds spent on long-term care facilities.

A special panel of lawmakers reviewing state spending on Medicaid and other programs for senior and disabled Utahns will receive the proposal at its next meeting Oct. 3. The lawmakers will make a recommendation by November, and the full Legislature would still have to act on it during the 2008 general session beginning in January.

"This is simply recognizing that the traditional skilled nursing at a care center model of caregiving is on the way out," Alan Ormsby, director of the state Division of Aging and Adult Services, said Tuesday. "I would never say there isn't a place for long-term care centers. But when you can provide safe and often more effective services at home and at less than a sixth the cost for most seniors, we have to at least begin moving in that direction."

Pressure to transition funding to where it is most effective is mounting, particularly in Utah, which according to state figures has the sixth-fastest growth rate in the country for people 65 and older.

Utah has both the authority and the blessing of the federal government. The Older Americans Act of 2006 gives states and local communities the power to make services to the elderly as home-based as possible. And the federal government's administrator of aging services endorsed the decision after speaking here Tuesday at the 16th annual conference of the Utah Gerontological Society.

"Any investment in long-term care must be in modernizing long-term care," said Josefina G. Carbonell, assistant secretary for the aging at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "Study after study, and program after program — and you have some of the best, most innovative ones in the country here in Utah — have shown both incredible benefits to the well-being of seniors and cost savings much too big to be ignored."

Utah has had nursing home placement diversion programs for at least 10 years, she said, citing in-home services, day care, nutrition and fitness programs in Salt Lake that are models for the country.