The health of homebound Medicaid recipients is in danger unless Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen immediately bars Arkansas from continuing to use a computer program to decide their in-home care needs, seven of those individuals say in a new court filing.
In a request filed Tuesday, the plaintiffs asked the judge to decide by Monday whether he will force the state, at least temporarily, to revert to the way it used to determine how much in-home service each recipient was allotted. The request notes that three plaintiffs are due to have their in-home care reassessed later this month.
The plaintiffs filed a lawsuit last week against the Department of Human Services over the use of the ARPath computer program to determine how many hours of caregiver assistance the state will pay for.
The plaintiffs are a group of men and women, all poor and most elderly, who have cerebral palsy, quadriplegia, multiple sclerosis or other "profound" disabilities and are ARChoices beneficiaries.
One of them, 35-year-old Bradley Ledgerwood, is an alderman of Cash in Craighead County and a member of the county's Republican committee, the lawsuit states.
The Medicaid program pays for an in-home caregiver to work 40 to 56 hours a week to help disabled beneficiaries to live on their own.
In choosing to rely solely on ARPath, the Human Services Department violated state open-government laws by changing its operations without allowing public input, the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit seeks to permanently bar the agency from relying solely on the program to make in-home care decisions for Medicaid recipients. The suit also wants the department to restore the in-home care hours for any recipient whose hours were reduced by ARPath.
Department representatives deny that the agency has done anything wrong.
ARPath was implemented to provide a more objective review of client needs to ensure that all beneficiaries receive a consistent, medically appropriate level of care, a spokesman said when the suit was filed last week.
An agency representative did not return an email seeking comment Wednesday. Human Services Department lawyers have not yet responded to the lawsuit.
ARChoices caregivers are paid by the hour to assist clients with regular activities like taking medication, eating, bathing, dressing, cooking, traveling and shopping. The plaintiffs say the program allows them to live more independently than the alternative, some kind of institutionalization, like in a nursing home.
The agency's new ARPath calculations have resulted in cutbacks that have forced the plaintiffs to go unattended for hours, according to the lawsuit. Their caregiver hours have been reduced by an average of 43 percent, the lawsuit states.
Because they have fewer hours with a caregiver, the plaintiffs have had to occasionally go hungry, lie in their own waste, wear dirty clothes, skip bathing or miss treatments, the lawsuit states.
The decrease in care has increased the risk of falling and adversely affected the health of some beneficiaries, according to the suit.
Until moving to rely solely on ARPath in 2016, Human Services' caregiver decisions were made by a nurse who consulted the ARPath program.
Attorney Kevin De Liban, with Legal Aid of Arkansas, wants the judge to at least exempt his clients from the new assessment methodology while restoring their in-home caregiver hours to the level they had before the system was changed.
In the petition for a temporary restraining order filed Tuesday, De Liban states that his clients meet the standard for imposing such an order in that they will suffer irreparable harm if the judge does not act.
De Liban further argues that the lawsuit meets another legal benchmark that entitles the plaintiffs to a restraining order in that they are likely to prevail in the litigation.
Legal Aid of Arkansas has previously challenged the agency over how it's been using ARPath.
In response to the group's federal lawsuit, a judge in October barred the Human Services Department from reducing benefits to a 90-year-old woman with Alzheimer's disease until the agency could explain the cutback. Ethel Jacobs died the next week.
Aside from Ledgerwood, the plaintiffs in the current lawsuit are: Louella Jones, 54, and Dana Wolf, 58, of Mountain Home; Peggy Sanders, 83, and Winnie Winston, 87, of Fayetteville; Marcus Strope, 61, of Paragould; and Michael Yarra, 54, of Osceola.
Metro on 02/02/2017