Maine Beacon -Volunteers and organizations that are part of the Mainers for Home Care coalition officially launched the Yes on Question 1 campaign on Tuesday to guarantee universal access to home care to seniors and Mainers with disabilities, saying the ballot initiative that will go before voters in November represents the best opportunity to fix a broken system.
“We are a grassroots coalition of more than 40 organizations and tens of thousands of individual Mainers who recognized the road we are on as a state is about to take us off a cliff,” said Ben Chin, campaign manager for Mainers for Home Care, which gathered 67,000 signatures last year to place the initiative on the ballot.
The average annual cost of home care for a senior in Maine was $52,624 in 2017. While that is cheaper than a one year in a private room in a nursing home — which cost $117,165 in 2017 — it is out of reach for most Maine families, the organizers say, and Medicare does not cover in-home care.
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