Some states raise pay for home caregivers as shortage looms

Filed 1mo ago · Via Stateline · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Hamster March

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Joop van Bilsen for Anefo · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons

States including California, New York, Illinois and Texas have raised Medicaid-funded home care aide wages, with California's base now at $16.90 an hour and New York City's at $19.65. The moves respond to a worsening shortage: 4.3 million home care aides work today against a projected need of more than 5 million by 2034.

The 2024 national median pay for home care aides was $16.78 an hour, near the bottom of the U.S. wage scale, a problem compounded by the pandemic and immigration enforcement under the Trump administration. Federal Medicaid cuts taking effect in 2027, part of the tax and spending law Trump signed, threaten to erase these state-level wage gains by pressuring states to scale back home- and community-based services.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Raising a wage by a dollar while a federal law prepares to cut the program that pays it is less a policy than a countdown clock, and the desk notes that the aides doing the actual work of keeping people out of nursing homes are, as ever, the last to be consulted about the math.

Source: Read the original at Stateline → Scored: Hamster March · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0