Home-care industry feeling the gas pain
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- July
- 10
  The home-health care industry is particularly hard hit by the high cost of gas, the Home Care Association of New York said in a statement released today. Forty-three of the state’s counties are rural, and many have only one or two home-care agencies that are certified to provide Medicare and Medicaid services. The average price of a gallon of gas in New York is $4.31, according to AAA.
  A recent study by the National Association of Home Care & Hospice found that home-care providers in New York made more than 57 million visits in 2006 and drove more than 493 million miles as a result.
  “For our providers, the patient-care environment is not restricted to a single facility at a defined location, but, rather, across entire geographic regions, often necessitating home-care staff to drive many miles to provide vital services to the most needy individuals in their homes,” said Joanne Cunningham, president of the Home Care Association.  “For Medicare and Medicaid certified providers who must absorb transportation costs, neither reimbursement structure recognizes or anticipates the kind of volatility we are seeing in today’s fuel market,” she said.
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on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 12:02 pm by Cara Matthews.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
