Flint Township, MI — With her black cat Ambrosia rolling around on the floor next to her, 61-year-old Laura Ward, bound to a wheelchair by Multiple Sclerosis (MS), howled with laughter as she cracked jokes with her caregiver Amie Wilson.
“There’s a lot of people a lot worse off than I am,” Ward said. “I’m not dying. I can get up every morning. I still am in my wheelchair. I can run around here, you know? … I’m happy to be alive.”
Wilson jokingly side-eyed Ward when she said she’s most grateful for her cat. “And my best caregiver ever,” Ward added. Ward is grateful for her independence, too, she said, especially after she fell in her bathtub in December 2020 and had to move to a nursing home.
At first, Ward was okay with living at the nursing home. Before long, however, she wanted out. By June 2021, she determined the nursing facility wasn’t suitable for her.
“The people working there were just terrible,” she said. “You couldn’t get changed. You couldn’t go to the bathroom when you needed to.” Ward said her experience at a nursing home was “terrible” due to staffing shortages, which prevented her from receiving basic care.
When help didn’t come, Ward and her 100-year-old roommate relied on each other, she said. She spent about six months in the nursing facility before returning to her Flint Township, Mich. home.
“I could not wait to get out of there. I pray to God I never have to go back,” she said. “There’s no place like home.”
Ward now receives her care through the Valley Area Agency on Aging (VAAA), which administers several programs for Genesee County’s aging community, such as the MI Choice Waiver Program.
“Seniors want to age in place, they want to age in the home, they want to age in a community, they want to age around their families,” VAAA CEO and President Yaushica Aubert said. “Unfortunately, a lot of seniors and caregivers don’t know that these programs exist. They think the only option is for family to do all of the care or to pay privately for the care or to put their senior, their loved one, in a nursing home — and there’s tons of other options that are available.”
From October 2022 to September 2023, VAAA served 476 people through MI Choice. As a whole, the organization has served more than 1,402 people with home care services. The majority of these clients are older than 60, but VAAA also serves people who are 18 to 59 years old who have been deemed disabled.
Aubert said VAAA, which was founded in 1976, has contracts with 50 to 60 different providers focused on services for seniors. Some of the services include home-delivered meals, bathing assistance, help with getting dressed, and laundry cleaning, or assistance with home modifications like ramps.
Debra Morgan is a community health supervisor at VAAA and oversees the Senior Lives Matter Project, a program set up to help people deal with stress from the Flint Water Crisis through health support. Morgan also works on intake for VAAA’s other programs, like MI Choice.
“Flint has some of the oldest residents in the state of Michigan and so with that, with a shrinking population as well, we have people that fall in the financial guidelines of that [program],” she said of the program.
According to 2022 U.S. Census, 13.5% of Flint’s population, or 10,780 people, are older than 65. In Genesee County, 19% of the population, or 76,376 people, are older than 65. As for Michigan, 18.7% of the population, or 1,876,223 people, are older than 65.
“Senior lives matter because the seniors are the jewels of our community,” Morgan continued. “In many instances, the seniors of the community have paved the way for the people that are coming behind them. You know, they’ve paved the way. They’ve been our nurses, they’ve been our teachers.”
States that have similar programs include California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, and Ohio.
In Illinois, the Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) Waiver for Persons Who are Elderly provides in-home services for people who are 65 or older, and people who are between 60-64 years old with a physical disability who require care from a nursing facility. Similar to the MI Choice Waiver Program, care is initiated and managed by local community agencies.
MI Choice services include:
- Adult day health (adult day care)
- Chore services
- Community health worker
- Community living supports
- Community transportation
- Counseling
- Environmental accessibility adaptations
- Fiscal intermediary
- Goods and services
- Home delivered meals
- Nursing services
- Personal emergency response systems (PERS)
- Private duty nursing/respiratory care
- Respite services
- Specialized medical equipment and supplies
- Training in a variety of independent living skills
How to receive services as a senior citizen
Aubert said the first step for a senior citizen to receive services is acknowledgment.
“The first step is knowing that you need some assistance, knowing that it’s okay to get some help, and knowing that help is out there for you; and it’s just a phone call away,” she said.
Once communication is established, the agency assigns an information and assistance specialist to ask questions about the senior, then guide their loved one in the right direction to applying to a program the senior could qualify for.
After the senior is approved for a program, a nurse or social worker will meet with them and their family to conduct a “comprehensive assessment.” In this assessment, potential clients will go over physical health, daily living activities, what the senior needs the most help with, and if they have any chronic diseases. After the assessment, the nurse or social worker sits down with the family and develops a “person-centered plan of care” to talk about what services would best meet the needs of the senior in their home, and then arrange to set up those services.
For MI Choice, there is a gross income cap of $2,829 per month, not including spouse’s income. Aubert said there are no out-of-pocket costs for the seniors. The program is completely covered by state and federal funds.
“When they make a higher income amount, a senior can get on our program and make $2,829 a month and still qualify for our program,” Aubert stated. “That just counts their income, we don’t count their spouse’s income.”
Morgan, who also assists with the intake process, said the program is for people who are either 65 or older with Medicaid and Medicare, or for people younger than 65 and older than 18, with disabilities and receive Medicaid and Medicare.
For more information, and to see if you qualify for services, call VAAA at 810-239-7671.
Gray Matters is produced in partnership with Valley Area Agency on Aging (VAAA) and
focuses on our aging population and the people who care for them.
