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Justice announces additional funding for child care subsidies, increase in Medicaid provider rates

(Capitol Notes - Graphic Illustration/MetroCreative)

CHARLESTON — With child care providers concerned about an impending cliff in the state child care subsidy at the end of August previously announced by human services officials, Gov. Jim Justice said Thursday that the program now has funding through the end of December.

Speaking during his weekly administration briefing Thursday afternoon from the State Capitol Building, Justice also announced that provider rates for Medicaid Waiver services through the Bureau of Medicaid Services will increase by 15% beginning in October.

The Medicaid Waiver program through the Department of Human Services funds services for families in order to care for eligible family members at home instead of those family members being placed in nursing homes, hospitals, and other care facilities. Programs include the aged and disabled waiver, the children with serious emotional disorder waiver, the traumatic brain injury waiver, and the intellectual and developmental disability (IDD) waiver.

Family support and personal care rates will also see rate increases beginning in October. Medicaid waiver programs, such as the IDD waiver, were cut in the budget bill passed by the Legislature earlier this year due to concerns about a possible clawback of federal dollars.

Lawmakers held a special session in May and restored more than $5 million to the Department of Health and more than $183 million for the Department of Human Services, though it was unclear if the funding found by DoHS was coming from the $183 million the Legislature restored to the department.

“We are increasing our provider waiver rates by 15% starting Oct. 1,” Justice said. “A lot of people though gosh, there’s no way. You can’t find any money and you can’t do this or that. But we really worked hard at this. We got the money from a lot of people working and pulling the rope together. With all that being said, we can get some more bucks to these great people who are absolutely doing God’s work. I’m just tickled to death to do that,” he said.

A December 2023 rate study report by the Bureau for Medical Services recommended that hourly rates for providers be raised. Companies that provide some Medicaid Waiver services have threatened to pull out of the state because of low reimbursement rates making it harder to hire and retain employees, especially in border counties.

Justice also said he intended to eliminate a new IDD waiver waitlist. According to WV News, the Bureau of Medicaid Services removed 50 people from the IDD waiver waitlist at a cost of $3.9 million. That is on top of an additional 99 people removed on July 1. At one point in Justice’s first term the IDD waiver waitlist was more than 1,000, but funding was included in the fiscal year 2021 budget to clear the backlog.

“When I got here, we had a terrible waitlist on IDD,” Justice said. “It took a little while, but we completely cleared the waitlist. We’ve got a new one now. We have some folks that are on this new waitlist … and a goal absolutely before I walk through the door is to clear the waitlist again.”

Justice also announced that DoHS has the money it needs to keep the state’s Child Care Assistance program funded through the first half of the fiscal year at the end of December.

DoHS officials told lawmakers during legislative interims in April that the department would need approximately $23 million – or $2.3 million per month – to abide by new federal rules that take effect in September requiring states to fund child care providers based on enrollment at individual facilities instead of attendance. Advocates for child care estimate that approximately 2,000 child care slots could be gone if the state didn’t provide additional funding.

“Everybody was running around all over the place, saying we have child care centers that are folding up right and left and we’re not going to have child care. A lot of it is unfounded,” Justice said. “With that being said, we’ve got funding, and we can do it. Our Legislature knows we have the dollars. What we’ve got to do is just make sure that we improve child care, because that is what drives young people to this great state, and we’ve got to have workers.”

West Virginia reimburses child care providers based on attendance. The state Child Care Program through the Bureau for Family Assistance provides financial assistance to working parents or parents attending public colleges to subsidize the cost of family-based child care or licensed center-based child care for families that meet income requirements.

Justice has said several times since the May special session that he would call another special session either coinciding with August legislative interim meetings beginning Sunday or later in the fall to appropriate remaining surplus tax collections from the previous fiscal year, pass another 5% cut to personal income tax rates, and pass a child and dependent care credit introduced during the 2024 session.

The governor’s child care tax credit proposal would have provided a credit against the personal income tax in the amount of 50% of the allowable federal child and dependent care credit, effective retroactively to Jan. 1. If passed, the credit could have returned up to $4.2 million to eligible taxpayers according to a fiscal note from the state Department of Revenue.

“When we come together for our special session, we’ve got to pass that (tax) credit,” Justice said. “But we also found enough federal funds to cover the cost of our centers with entirety until the end of the year.”

Steven Allen Adams can be reached at sadams@newsandsentinel.com

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