Steve Gold, The Disability Odyssey continues

Why has it been so difficult to convince your Governor and your office of Medical Assistance to offer older Americans and people with disabilities an equal choice of long-term care Medicaid services - in our own homes or in nursing homes? One reason is that the nursing home industry, in many States, makes significant financial contributions to the elected political officials in your States, and apparently the beneficiaries see the money.

We would not dare suggest these financial political contributions are in anyway related to the amount of reimbursements State set for nursing homes, nor do we think the political contributions might relate whether or not a State will reduce the number of unoccupied nursing home beds, nor are does the nursing home industry make for any reason other than to be good citizens.

OK. If you believe that, then stop reading this.

We have spent a lot of time and have available a break down in excel format for 17 States of political contributions from 2002 -2006 by specific contributor, dollar amount of contribution, beneficiary and the % of the contribution was of the beneficiary's total funds. We have only 17 because it is a time-consuming process to gather this information.

For the other States for which we do not have breakdown, we have the steps you can take to find out this information for your State.

With this information, we strongly suggest you confront your specific elected officials and ask them to return these political contributions so they might make decisions without any appearance of conflict of interest.

If you want to pursue this and only if you really will use the information to meet with these elected officials, email me with the name of your State and I will send you either information directly regarding your State (if its one of the 17 we've done) or tell you how to obtain this information.