THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, December 19, 1994 TAG: 9412190060
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DEBRA GORDON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 135 lines
``Oh me, oh my, I just dread this,'' Lorraine Rogers moaned as she rocked on the bed in her bare room at Dominion Village in Chesapeake.
``Not half as much as we do, Mama,'' said her daughter, Valerie Kelly, as she angrily stuffed her mother's clothes into cardboard boxes.
It was Dec. 2, the deadline for Kelly to move her 73-year-old mother out of the adult-care home where she'd lived for two years.
``We never expected this,'' said Kelly, who lives in Portsmouth. ``When I placed her there it almost killed me. And I thought she'd be there until the day she died or until she was ready for a nursing home.''
But in October, Dominion Village told Kelly to move her mother out. The home, which had changed ownership in the past year, was no longer accepting the state's auxiliary grants, which help the elderly pay for adult-care homes.
The maximum payment of $665 a month ``just isn't enough,'' said Dominion Village's administrator, Barbara Anne Mercier. ``Our rates are double that for someone coming in privately.''
So are the rates at many adult-care facilities in the area, which provide 24-hour care and assistance with daily living activities for those who can no longer live alone, but who don't need the skilled care of a nursing home.
And so, with the state's elderly population projected to double within the next 30 years, its supply of homes that accept the grants is shrinking.
In Hampton Roads, for instance, 36 of 60 licensed adult-care facilities are listed by the state as accepting auxiliary grants. And of those, only 12 reported any openings as of early December, most with only one or two beds. Six said they were no longer accepting the grants. One said it accepted the grant, ``but only if I can't find a much better person.''
And there are no laws restricting homes from evicting residents once they can no longer pay private rates. Or, in the case of Kelly's mother, when the home decides it no longer can make enough money accepting the grants.
Kelly can't care for her mother herself because she works two jobs. And she had called or visited every adult-care home in Portsmouth and Chesapeake but didn't find any in which she felt comfortable leaving her mother.
``If you do find any halfway decent homes, they're not accepting the grants,'' she said.
So she was moving her mother into a one-bedroom apartment in a senior citizen community in Chesapeake.
Between herself and her grown daughter, she hopes they will be able to check on her mother enough to ensure she takes her epilepsy medication, eats, and hasn't fallen.
The apartment costs $398 a month. That leaves Rogers $246 from her monthly Social Security check to pay for food, utilities and medicine.
But Rogers is afraid of living alone. ``I still have seizures. I'm afraid I'll have one by myself,'' she said on moving day. ``But what's got to be has got to be.''
Kelly is furious with Dominion Village's new owners, and blames the redecorating they did when they came in a year ago - the pretty flowered wallpaper, fancy window treatments, and floral couches and chairs - for her mother's expulsion.
But the renovation wasn't the reason for the change, says Mercier. ``It's the amount of staffing you need to provide good care. That's expensive.''
The decision to ask 10 of the 50 residents to leave, she said, ``was strictly a business decision.''
And while Mercier offered to help the families find new homes for their relatives, even scouting out homes herself, Kelly and at least one other family could not find acceptable homes with openings for auxiliary grant residents.
Katherine Matthews of Chesapeake ``tore up the phone wires,'' trying to find a home for her mother, 79-year-old Goldie Thomas, before she gave up and decided to have her mother live with her and her husband.
``You just can't shuffle old people around like this,'' she said. ``They just can't take it.''
Homes that accept auxiliary grants are usually the older, smaller, mom-and-pop type operations. They know they can't compete for the private pay market that a corporate facility like Sentara or Dominion Village attracts, so they've carved out a niche providing care to people with mental disabilities and the elderly, often having a range of ages in their home.
These homes don't have the pretty flowered wallpaper and pastel-colored furniture, the nutritionists, activity directors and social workers common in larger facilities.
They're more like Homecare of Virginia, a 25-bed facility in South Norfolk run out of a former four-unit apartment building.
The facility is clean, but small. The floors are worn linoleum, with scarred wooden cabinets lining the dining area and plastic-wrapped cushions on the old couches and chairs in the living room, where about a dozen residents sit watching television.
Small operators like Homecare, says its owner William Jones Jr., make it by working seven days a week, 365 days a year. They rely on churches and the Salvation Army for food donations. And they usually operate with a skeleton staff. Home-care, for instance, has six employees, including Jones, for its 25 residents.
``We do fund-raising, because you just can't make it on grants alone,'' said Mary Parker, owner of Cascade Retreat in Suffolk. Her home has room for 18 residents, and they're usually all grant recipients.
At Hill's Home for Adults in Chesapeake, owner Earl Hill reserves 70 percent of his beds for auxiliary grant residents. But it's the private residents, paying between $850 and $1,250 for a bed, who keep him solvent.
Most adult homes that take auxiliary grants also limit their clients to those who can walk, who are relatively healthy and who don't need much personal care.
That's why King's Grant House in Virginia Beach doesn't accept the grant, says its administrator, Elizabeth Holleman. ``When we take care of people who are confused or incontinent or who have handicaps, they require a lot more care, and it costs more to provide that care. Right now, (the state) doesn't pay for those things at this level.''
The General Assembly did pass legislation last year to create three levels of care for adult homes, with different auxiliary grant amounts pegged to each level of care.
That legislation, which was supposed to go into effect July 1, is on hold as adult-home operators and the state bicker over proposed regulations. MEMO: HOW THEY WORK
The auxiliary grant program was established in 1973 to supplement
income for those who either receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) -
the aged, blind or disabled - or would be eligible to receive SSI if
their income were lower. It is designed to ensure that they can maintain
a standard of living which meets a basic level of need, and is used for
those living in adult care residences.
The General Assembly sets the maximum rate adult care homes can
charge grant recipients. The state then supplements recipients' income
up to that amount, allowing for a $40 a month personal allowance.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo by TAMARA VONINSKI, Staff
Lorraine Rogers, here with her daughter Valerie Kelly, was recently
evicted from her home at the Dominion Village of Chesapeake, an
assisted-living facility. The home, which changed ownership in the
past year, no longer accepts auxiliary grants, used by residents
like Rogers.
KEYWORDS: ADULT HOME SENIOR CITIZEN by CNB