Woe be unto you if you are disabled, poor, and Alaskan.

If you match these three conditions, are Alaskan, and by some miracle are still alive, then you know all about Caribou Barbie’s “compassionate conservatism.”  Caribou Barbie’s “services” for disabled Alaskans combine the very worst in bureucratic gridlock and privatized healthcare to form a mean, murderous monolith that “takes care” of Alaska’s helpless poor in the usual “compassionate conservative” way.

If you weren’t disgusted by this money-grubbing, utterly cruel, and breathtakingly stupid woman, I believe this ought to do it for you. Yes, her apologists will whine that she just COULDN’T know about EVERYTHING, but facts are stubborn things, and the fact is that the State of Alaska has a population that is far less than a lot of American metropolitan areas. I think you’ll agree with me that there is just about no chance that a Mayor of any American city of size isn’t aware of, and looking at, programs like these.

Either she’s too stupid to run a roadside fruit stand, or she just doesn’t give a shit. Take your pick, because it cannot be any answer but one of these.

State programs intended to help disabled and elderly Alaskans with daily life — taking a bath, eating dinner, getting to the bathroom — are so poorly managed, the state cannot assure the health and well-being of the people they are supposed to serve, a new federal review found.

The situation is so bad the federal government has forbidden the state to sign up new people until the state makes necessary improvements.

No other state in the nation is under such a moratorium, according to a spokeswoman for the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

In the meantime, frail and vulnerable Alaskans who desperately need the help are struggling. One elderly woman is stuck in a nursing home, for lack of care at home. Another woman, suffering from chronic pain and fatigue, said she’s so weak, she often can’t even pop dinner into the microwave.

The moratorium is expected to last four or five months. State officials estimate about 1,000 Alaskans will be affected.

A particularly alarming finding concerns deaths of adults in the programs. In one 2 1/2 year stretch, 227 adults already getting services died while waiting for a nurse to reassess their needs. Another 27 died waiting for their initial assessment, to see if they qualified for help.

The programs at issue provide in-home help for thousands of Alaskans with the basics of life, from medication to meals. The goal is to help people stay in their own homes rather than go into nursing homes or other institutions.

The services are paid for by Medicaid, the state-federal health program for the poor and the disabled, and overseen by the state Division of Senior and Disabilities Services. Individuals qualify based on income and need. Private contractors do most of the work. The programs cost about $250 million this year, with the federal government currently paying 61 percent of the bill.

Two broad categories of programs are at issue: One, providing just personal care, serves 3,200 people and the other, with a broader range of services including home health care, helps about 3,800 through what are known as Medicaid waivers. Some clients get help through both types of program.

Division officials on Tuesday acknowledged serious problems, including a backlog of about 2,000 people waiting for a nurse assessment to determine what services they need. They said fixes are coming.

People in the programs are well served, the officials say, once they are signed up for services. They claim it’s mainly a paperwork and documentation problem.

“We do believe that quality care is happening in Alaska. Our system for getting that information is not well established. That’s what we have to fix,” said Rebecca Hilgendorf, director of senior and disabilities services.

One person waiting for her assessment is 80-year-old Esteen Knights-Thomas, who has been at Providence Extended Care most of the last month. She is recovering from an incident in Pennsylvania when her legs were scarred by acid from a strong insecticide used in her rented apartment, her daughter said.

Knights-Thomas said Providence is very nice, but “I would rather be at home with somebody helping me.”

For one, she’d like to eat what she wants. “Here you can’t do that. You have to eat what they give you,” said Knights-Thomas, who also is blind in one eye.

Her daughter La Verne Jones, 60, can’t provide the care herself. She can barely get around, suffers from a rare eye disease, and is overdue for a hip replacement. She was approved for personal care services before the moratorium, but that help can’t extend to her mother.

In March, the state told officials with the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services about the huge backlog of people waiting to be evaluated.

“That was the first red flag that went up for us, that something was going on there that was not meeting our expectations,” said Mary Kahn, a spokeswoman for the federal agency.

“Rather than continue to let the state admit more and more people into what we believe has been a poorly managed system, we just said hold the phone, we’re going to try to find other ways to serve these people,” Kahn said. “And we’re going to stop enrollment in this program because we are quite concerned.”

State officials said some private agencies in Alaska provide similar services through grant funding. But advocates say those services are very limited.

Another sign of trouble for the feds: eight lawsuits against the state division.

Most were brought by the Northern Justice Project, a private civil rights firm created in 2006 to pursue class action suits and other big cases.

“I think the lawsuits reflect that these two programs are and have been run incompetently for some time,” said Jim Davis, one of the partners and founders of the justice project.

The common thread in the suits is that seniors and disabled Alaskans aren’t getting the services they are entitled to, under the law, Davis said. In one big win, the state Supreme Court ruled last year that the state had improperly cut off or reduced services to more than 1,000 needy people.

The sad fact of the matter is that stories like these are far from unusual in Alaska, a bastion of Rushpublican incompetence for some time now. The thing to note here is how much worse things got during the reign of America’s Welfare Queen, a person who billed herself on the Presidential campaign trail as being someone who cares about people with disabilities. And Caribou Barbie had resources to deal with this that were unheard of in previous Alaskan Administrations.

We know now, for sure, EXACTLY how much she cares about the disabled of her own state, the one group of disabled people she was in a position to help. She ignored them throughout her stint as Governor, and she walked off on them at the very moment that the Federal Government had to step in because of how awfully the disabled poor are faring in Alaska.

I can’t think of a better way to end this than finishing up with the late, great Michael Jackson’s song that neatly fits Republican policies in America.

‘Nuff said.

Tags: alaska, disabled, failure, incompetence, palin

This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 1:38 am and is filed under Jolly Roger, Republican'ts!, Stupidity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.