Building upon our success with the Support at Home campaign which won up to 15 hours of subsidized homecare per week, Hand in Hand and members as part of the Care Council, came together to put California on a path toward universal Long-term Services and Supports (LTSS).
Our vision was to bring together members of the disability community, older adults and organized homecare workers together to build a long-term care system that ensures everyone can get the supports they need to live and age in their homes, while also providing fair wages and good benefits to the long-term care workforce.
We focused our energy on educating all of the Gubernatorial candidates to ensure that they recognized that the high cost of Long-term Services and Supports was creating a crisis for both the individuals and their families that need LTSS as well as the professional caregivers that provide it. CA has an estimated shortage of between 600,000-3 million direct care workers in the next 15 years.
As a result, Governor Elect, Gavin Newsom declared the state of older Californians and aging in the state as one of his top four priorities coming into office.
Between 2018-2020, Hand in Hand joined a broader network of advocacy, policy and grassroots organizations of older adults, people with disabilities and homecare workers to win a new LTSS social insurance program that would provide some relief to all Californians who need to pay for their homecare or other LTSS. In that time, we’ve won $3 million in the state budget in 2018 to add long-term care questions to the CHIS (California Health Interview Survey) to be able to get data on the state’s LTSS needs and $1 million in the state budget in 2019 for an actuarial study of possible program designs. And we’ve helped secure universal LTSS as a top priority in the draft Master Plan for Aging, a project of the Newsom administration.
