Monthly Archive for August, 2007

An initiative launched last fall by Maine PASA to raise legislators’ awareness of direct-care workers and to get direct-care workers involved in helping to shape the state’s legislative agenda appears to have helped keep alive LD 1687, a bill that would extend health insurance to more Maine workers.

Joyce Gagnon, who spearheaded the effort, called other Maine PASA members and asked if they’d be willing to call or write to their legislators. “We asked to talk to them about the specific kind of work they did and the skills they used to do it, because there are so many kinds of direct-care workers out there. We asked them to talk about health insurance: did they have it? We asked them to talk about what effect not having it – or having it – had.” They also asked for support of the bills then in session that would help direct-care workers, which included LD 1687.

The effort, says Gagnon, raised awareness of direct-care workers and their issues among legislators who often had not know exactly what they did or how many there were. “It brought an awareness that here are a group of people that are working under very extreme conditions. It also brought an awareness that PASA itself was standing up and saying, hey, you got to do something. And it brought PASA members an awareness that legislators would listen to them and they could get something done.”

Roy Gedat, the executive director of Maine PASA when the initiative was launched, agrees. Talking to legislators after the calls were made was a different experience than it had been before, he says. “When we went to the legislature this session, they already knew about us. They were very receptive to what we had to say.”

Maine PASA plans to continue the initiative indefinitely as new bills and opportunities emerge, and as new people are elected to office. “I think it was a great start and we need to continue doing more,” says Barbara Asnes, Maine PASA’s new executive director. “I don’t think most legislators have a clear idea of what it means to be a DCW. They hear multiple stories; they believe what they believe. And I think we’re in an excellent position to make it clear from the workers’ point of view.”

One of the thing the organization plans to ask legislators next term, Asne says, is “to consider, even if they can’t do full-fledged [family] health care, to allow some kind of funding or subsidies so people can at least get individual coverage.”

In another indication of Maine’s heightened awareness of the direct-care worker crisis, a recent Kennebec Journal Morning Sentinel article about an awards ceremony for exceptional caregivers focused largely on the need for better pay and benefits for direct-care workers.

The article, which ran in the August 16 issue, quotes state long-term care ombudsman Brenda Gallant on the poor pay and benefits typically available to workers. “Here we have caregivers who oftentimes can’t get care themselves,” she says. “They don’t have health insurance.” Lisa Pohlmann of the Maine Center for Economic Policy and the Maine Health Care for Health Care Workers campaign echoes Gallant’s comments. “We’re taking care of the elderly on the backs of low-income women,” she says.