Hello Caregiver Advocates:
771 signatures. 229 from 1,000. I wanted to acknowledge the kind and powerful people that shared the petition - and to the people that have signed it, your voice IS making a difference. I will be representing your voice as a family caregiver, as a stakeholder to the newly formed Colorado Commission on Medicaid.
The Colorado Commission on Medicaid meets Thursday, June 4. My written brief is on record. I will be in Room 220 of the Old Supreme Court Chamber as a registered volunteer lobbyist — and as the voice and intention of my role as Caregiver Systems Designer with the Colorado CARE Act.
Every name on this petition is evidence I carry into that room.
Please share this petition today — with one person who is carrying something the Commission's documents cannot see.
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This week Rose asked to go home.
She asks it often now - more frequently than before, the disease progressing into new territory. My wife and I have developed a language for it together. Not a correction. An invitation.
We're inviting you to have dinner and stay with us tonight.
And she settles. Oh. I didn't know.
That response - the relief in it, the settling - is the product of months of sustained attention to one specific person. My wife and I arrived at those words together because the other formulations didn't work, and we adjusted, and we learned. That knowledge cannot be purchased from a staffing agency. It cannot be replicated by rotating care staff. It cannot be rebuilt once the caregiving arrangement collapses.
It is exactly the kind of expertise the Commission's documents have no instrument to measure.
Before Thursday, I want to name five things the Commission probably doesn't know.
One: The 33-person workforce exit calculation that erases the $1.1 million in projected savings from the caregiver hour cap - using HCPF's own numbers - does not appear to have been modeled.
Two: H.R. 1's 80-hour monthly work requirement explicitly applies to caregivers with dependents over 14. Colorado will spend $57 million per year on H.R. 1 eligibility review administration - 52 times the $1.1 million saved by the cap. Two pressures operating on the same population from opposite directions. This intersection has not been mapped.
Three: No Colorado dataset measures whether employed family caregivers know the POWR Act exists. No dataset measures the creative dismissal pattern. No dataset captures what it costs when the accommodation conversation never happens.
Four: CASI is building the Caring Costs survey to fill this gap - the first Colorado-specific primary data instrument measuring legal awareness, creative dismissal, and accommodation outcomes. Not how hard caregiving is. What the law isn't doing and what it costs when it fails.
Five: The expertise - the invitation rather than the correction, the words that settle someone into the evening - cannot be purchased after it is lost. Every cost-containment measure in HCPF's documents assumes the caregiving capacity they rely on is stable. None models what happens when it isn't.
The Colorado CARE Act addresses all five gaps at zero general fund cost.
Dispatch Three will report from Room 220 after June 4.
Read Dispatch Two - "What the Commission Doesn't Know": [https://open.substack.com/pub/therevenueneutralcaregiver/p/the-long-game-dispatch-2?r=6a52ih&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true]
Sign or share here: https://c.org/WjGpN6TYnB
771 signatures. 229 from 1,000.
Oh. I didn't know. She settles when we invite her.
Colorado can build the law that keeps the person who knows how to do that - employed, present, and protected.
Kindly and Gratefully,
- Mark Fukae Director of Advocacy, Professionals Who Care Founder, CASI - Caregiver Advocacy Support Initiative Colorado Registered Volunteer Lobbyist mark_fukae@casiadvocacy.org | casiadvocacy.org