Advocacy
By Maddy Bynes, Special to Never Too Late A Preventable But Looming Funding Crisis It’s no surprise that the past several years have been difficult for all of us, but the COVID-19 pandemic hit older adults, especially those of who belong to communities of color or other marginalized communities, the hardest. In the past three years PCOA has received significant investments from both the federal and state government for pandemic related services that allowed us to increase services and emergency support for older adults and their caregivers. Since the beginning of the pandemic Area Agencies on Aging statewide received over $60 million in one-time increased federal funds and $2 million in one-time state funds. Many of the legislation that originally provided these federal funds have already expired, meaning the funding is no longer available for PCOA to use. The image below, taken from the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of federal funding to the Older Americans Act over the past decade.
The same rings true for the state level funding. A new report from USAging shows that Arizona’s investments in aging services when compared to the federal share through the Older Americans Act falls far below the national average of 24% and comes in at just 17%. This year we are working hard at both the state and federal level to avoid any cuts to funding and attempting to expand funding to ensure that services can continue at sustainable levels. But we are running into some difficult challenges. At the federal level, a tense standoff is building between the Republican and Democratic Senators and Members of Congress over the debt ceiling. Some people in Congress want to drastically reduce funding to services like ours in exchange for votes to not default on the US debt. Meanwhile at the State level, another tense standoff exists between the Republican controlled legislature and the new Governor over everything from funding to policy to nominations of cabinet level positions. PCOA is completely non-partisan and thus doesn’t take positions on who is right or wrong in these standoffs, but ultimately the standoffs create a tense environment for not only legislators, but for everyone served in systems like ours. We need your help in reaching out to your Members of Congress and State Legislators to ask them to put aside partisan politics and ensure that increased funding for services supporting older adults is guaranteed this year. Visit advocate.pcoa.org today to contact your elected officials.
You can see clearly that the orange COVID-19 funding creates a clear cliff for services, not just for PCOA, but also for older adults and their caregivers all across the nation. Not only are we facing a world where there could be a substantial funding decrease, but we are also providing more services with less funding per capita than we were just ten years ago. Though visually it looks like there’ve been increases for the past 5 years, when adjusted for inflation, we know that we have less per capita spending power than each year prior. According to the US inflation calculator, we’ve seen a 21.5% inflation since FY 2012, which means at $2.18 billion in FY 2022 would be equivalent to $1.71 billion in FY 2012. This analysis shows that there is actually less funding today than there was a decade ago for the same services and an increased population.
April 2023, Never Too Late | Page 29
Pima Council on Aging
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