Long-term care provides vital services in Washington. Without funding, it’s in danger | Opinion

What surprises people most about my job in an assisted living community is that it’s not just elderly grandparents who live in our building. The majority of the patients at the assisted living facility where I work are among our community’s most vulnerable individuals — without state-provided funding they would be unnecessarily hospitalized or sleeping on the street.

My job is to provide a safe and stable environment for people who cannot live on their own due to mental illness, traumatic brain injuries, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and, above all else, the lack of a personal support network.

For the vast majority of our residents, access to care is thanks to state and federal Medicaid support. For organizations like ours, we can only afford to accept and care for these patients because our state legislature has recognized that the state-funded Medicaid rates are wildly insufficient to maintain the number of facilities we need in our communities.

As a result, they voted to provide temporary add-on bridge funding in 2023 and the funding was extended again last year. Now, as the bridge funding is set to expire this summer and our state battles a budget deficit, we are faced once again with the catastrophic possibility of closing community-based assisted living facilities and pushing our social services and healthcare systems further into crisis. The legislature must extend this bridge funding when they adopt a budget this year.

Long-term care communities like ours provide stability and preventative healthcare that breaks the cycle of over-reliance on emergency rooms and crisis centers. If this bridge funding ends, fifty-five facilities across the state like ours are at risk of closure and further shrinking our already overstressed network of community-based providers who serve and support Medicaid residents.

For the 2,400 Washington residents who currently rely on this funding to receive the care they need, we are the last line of support. At our facility in Tacoma, we care for 89 residents. Fiscally, this investment is saving our state money by stabilizing one of our most at-risk groups of people. Morally, it is how we care for our neighbors who need support the most. The alternative is disaster on all fronts.

Since the bridge funding went into place, we have been able to immediately address our most pressing need: increasing wages to retain high-quality staff. Although my colleagues have plenty of options for where they could work, they choose to be here because they are emotionally invested in caring for our residents. They understand that sometimes, some of us just need a little bit more help.

The stubborn stigma associated with people experiencing homelessness or mental health crisis has prevented sustainable investment in long-term care. But the care we provide in assisted living communities is an essential part of our social fabric. We are here to care for those who cannot care for themselves. By providing our staff with a competitive living wage, we have been able to stay fully staffed and further stave off the possibility of closure.

If legislators abandon the bridge funding for assisted living facilities, they will be faced with the problem of system collapse they saw coming years ago. When people who need assisted living services like ours are forced into an unsupported environment, it is inevitable that they will end up drawing on state resources to survive.

The most critical concerns of our current political conversations — increased homelessness, stressed healthcare systems, insufficient mental health treatment — are all impacted when community support systems are stripped of the resources needed to prevent crisis in the first place. The human consequence will become very real when buildings close and hundreds of people have nowhere else to go.

This bridge funding was put into place as a temporary solution. It has been invaluable in stabilizing our services and ensuring that residents will receive the care they require. I have seen firsthand that it is possible to avoid a preventable loss of taxpayer dollars — like unnecessary calls to 911 — when we are fully staffed and fully equipped to serve our residents. Legislators must stay firm in their commitment to ending our long-term care crisis. Bridge funding for assisted living facilities has been just that: a bridge. Now it’s time to finish what we started, find a long-term solution, and prevent the crisis we set out to address in the first place.