Homecare fraud: you're lucky if you can find it!

Recently there has been some press coverage about homecare fraud with nearly all of it being bad. If we didn't get bad press we'd get no press at all. It seems the nature and cost effectiveness of homecare is horribly misunderstood. If you follow the LameStream media's coverage of this attack on homecare you'd think that the disabled poor and those who care for them are criminals worthy of only the harshest treatment. Following the Governator's line of reasoning one might think were it not for homecare the State wouldn't have a budget deficit at all! Here's an example of the spoon-fed and lopsided thinking that makes my blood boil.

 

This is exactly what we don't need: division among the consumers (clients) as to who is eligible. Having met several homecare providers (workers) and their consumers I can tell you if a consumer is receiving homecare services it's vital to the well-being and happiness of the consumer. My wife is much happier living with me than living in a group home! Homecare is no road to riches for the providers and it saves the State far more than it would spend if it housed every consumer in a nursing home, group home or whatever dungeon they think the disabled poor should be warehoused in.

When legislators and journalists stop blindly accepting what someone else tells them is the irrefutable truth (the Gov tells the Legislature, and the journalists gobble up whatever they hear from Sacramento) and the State attempst to find the fraud, they find much less fraud exists than is reported by the media. In 2007, the Gov stated it was as high as 25%, but when investigated by his own administration it was found to be no more than 1%. Don't get me wrong: even 1% is unacceptable but the way the State is going about reducing fraud is Draconian, and obviously lopsided (which is putting it nicely). For those who choose to abuse the system and steal from both us the taxpayers and us the overwhelmingly majority of honest workers just trying to earn a living, I say hang them up by their ampersand caret asterisk toes in the middle of town.

The money spent to detect and stop fraud is ridiculous in both absolute dollars and when the amount of money recovered is divided into the amount spent finding the fraud in the first place. Here are some examples:

 

Did y'all get that: they spent $3 million to save $315,000! That's $157,894.74 per conviction! I thought the Zombies' dollar-to-vote ratio was out of control but this is ridiculous! A quick run crunching the numbers shows this was a prime example of the State's penny-wise but pound-foolish approach to handling our tax money.

Maximum number of hours that can be assigned to any one consumer: 283 (a 40 work week is 173 hours a month, 283 is ~1.6 times more)
Hourly wage for IHSS workers in Sacramento: $10.40
Months in a year: 12
A years worth of homecare work at the above given wage comes out to $35,318.40

Difference between cost per conviction and maximum payout for one consumer's worth of work (283 x 10.40 x 12=): $110,576.34.

I say (s)he who wastes more money gets required lifetime employment at McDonald's working the drive thru window!

So, yet again way more money is spent than is recovered, but at least the politicians can feel good about their efforts to root out the fraud. Sheesh, does it hurt to be this stupid?

This is not an isolated example of the State's overzealous attack on the poor and defenseless.

 

So as you can see the State is very concerned about the 0.2% (NOT 2%!) in over-payments in Fresno county, the State's leader in homecare fraud detection, prevention and conviction and the only way they can see to fix the problem and punish this despicable and very small group of scamming "caregivers" is to take us all down. Make the poor poorer (reduce us to minimum wage), punish the innocent (fingerprinting for all), surely that will solve all our problems!

So to combat this problem they've written the "improvements" below into law. As far as I know they have yet to figure out how to implement these new laws. What the State has in mind is indeed punitive:

• checks can't be mailed to P.O. boxes (which is a bummer because in my neighborhood, a P.O. box is an excellent way to prevent identity theft)
• fingerprints for both the provider and consumer put on each timecard (Who pays for the ink? Who is charged with matching 800,000+ fingerprints to people on a semi-monthly basis? What if a consumer doesn't have (accessible) thumbs? Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty"?)
• State required but not funded fingerprinting for both consumers and providers (and where were the Zombies when these proposal became law? Busy fighting with members, again!)
• unannounced home visits (Which seem to be in violation of  multiple homecare contracts about the consumer's right to chose whom, how and when someone enters their home.)

Seems like overkill doesn't it?

A few things need to be said about fraud:

• fraud is wrong, no matter the justification or significance
• those who commit fraud, both providers and (living) consumers must be punished
• the rest of us who aren't committing fraud need to be left alone, no fingerprinting at our own expense to prove our innocence
• the folks handling the timecards (counties) and the folks who cut the checks (the State) need some simple checks to be put in place, specifically:

• no checks for the consumers known to be deceased (except for consumers who passed away mid pay period)
• no checks for providers or consumers who are in jail

Had the counties and the State been checking for this all along who knows how much money could have been saved. Consider the lack of seething animosity that could have been avoided. The oft reported, but grossly exaggerated costs of IHSS fraud could simply never have happened but for that you'd need a state that cares for it's elderly and disabled poor, instead of taking every possible action to move us both ever-faster into the grave. Even when these fraudsters are caught it's a great expense to the State and the money is not always recovered.

Fortunately for us all the writing of a few bright minds makes it's way to the Op-Ed sections of our newspapers and blogs.

Indeed, this is a rare voice of reason is a sea of stupity.