AARP Arkansas’s 2009 Legislative Priorities

Medicaid Home Care, Identity Theft, Lost Adults, More

AARP Arkansas is focused on five legislative priorities for the upcoming 2009 legislative session and your support is needed.  Our legislative issues are described below.
 
Choices in Care—Medicaid Personal Care Reimbursement
To increase residents’ choices in long-term care, AARP supports increasing the Medicaid reimbursement rates for home care workers.

• Some Arkansans are denied home care because home care providers cannot offer competitive wages and benefits to potential home care aides.
• When home care is not available, Arkansans are forced to live in nursing homes, where they pay up to four times the cost of home care.
• Two federal minimum wage hikes mandate raising the minimum wage paid to homecare workers by $1 per hour by 2009, but the mandate is unfunded because Medicaid reimbursement rates for these services have not increased since 2004.

Prevent Forced Foster Care—Grandparents Raising Grandchildren
To reduce the number of Arkansas children who are forced into foster care, AARP supports a small subsidy to grandparents and other relatives who have been granted legal guardianship.

• More than 33,600 grandparents are responsible for grandchildren living with them. 
• Twenty-two percent live in poverty.
• You ‘age out’ of the foster care system, but you don’t age out of a family.

Prevent Identity Theft—Security Freeze
To protect Arkansans from identity theft and financial fraud, AARP supports allowing residents to prevent unauthorized access to (freeze) their credit report.

• The permanent freeze is free to identity theft victims, active members of the military, and to Arkansans age 65 years or more.  The fee for others is $5.
• A temporary freeze may be applied or lifted for free.

Decent Housing for All—Housing Trust Fund
To increase Arkansans’ housing choices, AARP supports creating a dedicated state Housing Trust Fund that increases funding for safe, accessible, affordable housing for 50+ residents. 

• Funds may be used for new or rehabilitated rental or resident-owned housing.
• Arkansas is one of 12 states in the nation without a Housing Trust Fund.

Lost Adult Alert-Silver Alert
To save the lives of lost adults in Arkansas who suffer from cognitive disabilities (such as Alzheimer’s), AARP supports adding a Silver Alert system modeled after the existing Alert system to find missing children.

Other states have found it costs little or nothing to save lives with a Silver Alert.

Related Articles

Housing Trust Funds
Nov. 2007 research report on Housing Trust Funds

Grandparents raising grandchildren
State fact sheets for grandparents raising grandchildren

Other Resources

Identity Theft Resource Center
Dedicated exclusively to the understanding and prevention of identity theft,  the ITRC provides consumer and victim support as well as public education.  The ITRC also advises governmental agencies, legislators, law enforcement, and businesses about the evolving and growing problem of identity theft

Arkansas Legislature Web site
Brief descriptions of five legislative priorities for AARP Arkansas in the 2009 Legislative Session