By Dave Ranney
KHI News Service

TOPEKA — Advocates for the physically and mentally disabled today accused the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services of enacting policies aimed at restricting access to state’s Medicaid-funded in-home services.

“The numbers of people on the PD (physically disabled) waiver in the last three years have fallen off a cliff,” said Rocky Nichols, a spokesman for the Big Tent Coalition, an alliance of dozens of advocacy groups and home- and community-based service providers.

In Kansas, in-home services for the people who are low-income and physically or mentally disabled are funded through the state’s Medicaid program, which is now called KanCare.

The coalition held a press conference Thursday at the Statehouse.

“People with disabilities, unfortunately, are far too often getting lost in KanCare,” said Nichols, who’s also executive director at the Disability Rights Center of Kansas. “This is a crisis and, unfortunately, it’s a man-made crisis.”
State reports, he said, show that while almost 7,000 people with physical disabilities received Medicaid-funded, in-home services in 2010, enrollment in 2014 is down to about 5,500.

“Even more troubling,” Nichols said, was that the numbers of people on the KDADS-administered waiting list for the services have been in decline, too.

KDADS, he said, appears to be making it more difficult for people to apply for services and continue receiving them.

“The State of Kansas seems to have created a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Nichols said. “It’s taking steps to make it harder to stay on the waiting list, creating cracks in the system, and then letting people fall through those cracks.”

Nichols also pointed to data showing that under KanCare, per capita spending on the physically disabled has increased more than 40 percent.

Under KanCare, he said, the state appears to be spending more money on fewer people.

“Where is this money going?” he said.

Afterward, KDADS Secretary Shawn Sullivan told KHI News Service that Nichols assertions were incorrect.

Between 2010 and 2012, he said, the decline in enrollment was driven by increases in care costs.

“It took more money to serve the same number of people,” Sullivan said.
As people exited the program, he said, their slots often were not filled because the department didn’t have the funding.

Today, Sullivan said, KDADS has the money — $9 million in fiscal 2014, $9 million in fiscal 2015 but has encountered difficulties locating people on the waiting list.

“It’s taken us several months and several hundred phone calls to find people to fill the 100 slots that we’ve filled,” Sullivan said.

KDADS, he said, now suspects that the waiting-list numbers are inflated.

“We have 5,515 on the PD waiver now,” Sullivan said. “We have room to go to 5,900 and we’re doing everything we can to get there.”

The system’s costs, he said, have not increased as much as Nichols claimed.

“Any way you look at, there are 1,500 fewer people on the PD waiver than there were four years ago,” Nichols said. “To us, that’s shocking.”

At the press conference, five people with physical and mental disabilities talked about troubles they’ve had with KDADS.
“I am a brain injury survivor who’s lost in the KanCare system,” said Tammy Leach, a 50-year-old Topeka woman who was critically injured in an automobile accident in 2011. “I’ve been waiting patiently for services for five months. There are plenty of slots open and I’ve been declared eligible, but I can’t get the state to approve or deny my application. It just sits there. I can’t get a straight answer from anyone.”

Leach’s injuries led to the amputation of the lower half of her right arm.

“I am a proud person,” she said. “I had worked my entire adult life before my injury. I want to work again, but the state won’t let me rehabilitate my brain. The state is holding me back.”

Nichols said KDADS’ efforts to contact people on the waiting lists have been half-hearted.

“We can put them in touch with hundreds of people who’ve been declared eligible for services and been on the waiting list for years,” he said. “These are people who haven’t changed addresses for years, but they haven’t heard a word from KDADS. For the state to say they can’t find them is just not true.”