From DC is Justice in Growing older’s weekly roundup of nationwide information and assets about points impacting older adults. To obtain From DC in your inbox as quickly as its printed, join our mailing record.
Right here’s what we’re watching in Washington:
Persevering with Decision Briefly Funds, however Additionally Excludes, Key Packages
On the finish of final yr, Congress handed a brief spending invoice (often known as a unbroken decision, or CR) to increase funding for the federal authorities into March 2025. This invoice supplies short-term funding for important applications for older adults and folks with disabilities, but it surely additionally failed to incorporate important provisions.
Amongst optimistic highlights, the CR ensures:
- Adequate funding to keep up present ranges of federal rental help.
- An extension of funding for outreach and enrollment help for low-income Medicare enrollees.
Nevertheless, the CR disregarded essential proposals and applications, together with:
- Reauthorization of the Older People Act (OAA). OAA applications help the well being, dignity, and independence of older adults and embody authorized help, diet providers, senior heart applications, caregiver help, and extra.
- Insurance policies that may help entry to Medicaid home- and community-based providers, enhance language entry in telehealth, and get rid of price sharing for all generic pharmaceuticals for folks with the Half D Low-Revenue Subsidy.
Within the coming yr, Justice in Growing older will proceed to induce Congress to reauthorize the OAA and to guard housing, well being, and different applications for low-income older adults. Learn extra about areas the place older adults want our advocacy in 2025 and the way cuts to Medicaid would hurt older adults.
HUD Releases 2024 Knowledge Exhibiting Rise in Homelessness
The U.S. Division of Housing and City Growth (HUD) lately printed Half 1 of the 2024 Annual Homelessness Evaluation Report. This report contains nationwide estimates from Level-in-Time (PIT) counts of unsheltered and sheltered people experiencing homelessness on a single evening in January 2024.
In comparison with 2023, the variety of unhoused folks elevated by 18% reaching an all-time excessive of over 771,000 people, reflecting the necessity for elevated investments in housing and homelessness help. Over 146,000 folks, or roughly 19%, had been age 55 or over. About half of those older adults had been unsheltered.
Study connecting older adults to HUD homeless help applications and Justice in Growing older’s work on homelessness prevention.
In late December, the U.S. District Courtroom for the District of Columbia issued a determination within the class motion case, Brown, et al v. District of Columbia, ruling that the District had failed to tell Medicaid nursing facility residents that they might go away their services and as a substitute obtain house well being providers of their communities, and failed to attach these people with housing choices and community-based providers to ease their transitions.
The courtroom dominated that D.C.’s failures violated the People with Disabilities Act (ADA) integration mandate and the Supreme Courtroom’s Olmstead v. LC determination. It additionally ordered the District to develop and implement a system to assist nursing facility residents transition to community-based long-term care and serve folks with disabilities in essentially the most built-in setting.
Social Safety Equity Act Signed into Regulation
On January 5, President Biden signed into legislation the Social Safety Equity Act which is able to finish a apply that diminished Social Safety advantages for staff who obtained sure varieties of pension earnings, together with from state and native public pensions.
People receiving a public pension who’re enthusiastic about submitting for Social Safety advantages can go to the Social Safety Administration (SSA) web site to be taught extra, file on-line, or schedule an appointment with their native SSA workplace.
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New from the Nationwide Middle on Regulation & Elder Rights (NCLER)
On January 21st, NCLER will host a coaching on Elder Abuse Illustration 101: Case and Consumer Administration. That is the primary coaching in a three-part collection designed to offer authorized and elder rights practitioners with the fundamental instruments and civil authorized methods wanted to assist older adults who’ve skilled abuse. This webinar will deal with case and consumer administration.
