For home care providers the story of 86-year-old Josephine Bronczyk of Forest Lake, Minn, started out all too familiar. Bronczyk didn’t want to go into a nursing home, but no one would listen. She ended up in a nursing home despite her desire for home care, and, for many seniors, this is where the story ends.

But this was not the end of Bronczyk’s story. She sued.

“I will be the one to decide—me and nobody else,” she told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which interviewed her before she appeared in front of a Federal judge to ask the court to determine for the first time that the US Constitution guarantees all mentally competent people—no matter how physically disabled—the right to decide for themselves where they will live.

According to US District Judge David Doty, she may have a case. He heard her argument on January 10 and at press time was deciding if the state law that allowed a social worker to pressure Bronczyk into the nursing home violated the Fourth and 14th Amendment rights protecting property and liberty from seizure without due process.

Bronczyk may still be the exception rather than the rule, but she is part of a growing body of empowered consumers who are insisting that, for them, the best care is home care.

In September of this year ADAPT, an activist organization for people with disabilities, is sponsoring a 2-week march in support of the Medicaid Community Attendant Services Act (MiCASA), which will culminate in a rally in Washington, DC, on September 17.

Clearly, these empowered consumers can be a great help to the home care industry as it faces competitive bidding and inherent reasonableness reimbursement reductions. (See our “Federal Outlook 2003” starting on page 24.) But we can’t expect consumers to be there for this industry if it is not there for them.

“I think it is time to put our money where our mouth is,” says Tim Pontius, president and CEO of Young Medical of Toledo, Ohio, which put up $500 to support ADAPT’s march. “We need to do little things on an ongoing basis to show [consumers] we are in this with them.”

The fact that consumers had already come to Washington, DC, to join AAHomecare members on their Capitol Hill visits during last year’s lobbying against competitive bidding made the choice to contribute a no-brainer for Gary Gilberti, whose company, Chesapeake Rehab, of Baltimore, also chipped in $500. “This was a good opportunity to give back,” he says. “It just seemed like the right thing to do.”

For details on how you can get involved in supporting the MiCASA march, turn to “Letters to the Editor” on page 14 and read the letter by David Williams, government relations director for Invacare Corp, Elyria, Ohio—which incidentally put in $1,000 in support of the march. In addition, information about ADAPT and MiCASA can be obtained online at www.adapt.org.

And for details on future opportunities to help consumers spread the message that home care is a patient-preferred and cost-effective method of delivering care and therefore deserves to be funded properly by Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers, keep reading Dealer/Provider magazine.

Lena Lindahl
llindahl@medpubs.com