Helen Hanson
The good news just keeps coming from Maine, where a federal grant will provide health care coverage for thousands of uninsured direct care workers and others and where direct care workers Helen Hanson and Julie Moulton have been appointed to the group that is revamping the state’s long-term care system. On August 28, The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram published a strong editorial by Hanson, in which she calls for “a health care plan that meets the needs of direct-care workers and millions of other low-wage workers across America.”
Hanson applies what she has learned from her work in Maine to the national situation in her editorial, which begins by describing her struggle to find affordable health insurance for her family in the years before her husband got a job that offers health insurance. She also writes about the high rate of uninsurance among direct care workers and how it contributes to the profession’s high turnover rates. “When our family didn’t have insurance, I always feared that if I were to get cancer, I would have to give up my caregiving work and find a job that offered health coverage,” she says. “This was a choice I didn’t want to make, but it is one that faces Maine’s direct-care workers every day.”
Hanson makes the connection between a stable direct care workforce and quality care for elders and people with disabilities and lays out ground rules for insurance that would adequately cover direct care workers and other low-wage employees.
