CSCS: Council of Senior Centers and Services of NYC, Inc.

Queens Chronicle Article

Thursday, December 09, 2010

By AnnMarie Costella

Publication & Publisher: Queens Chronicle

Anthony Lobue, 101, is lucky to have family
close by, but worries about what the cuts
would mean for seniors who are alone.
PHOTO BY ANNMARIE COSTELLA

Ask Queens Village resident Anthony Lobue about his 101 years of life and he will tell you about his stint as an Army electrician during World War II, his decades of service with Con Edison and his trips to the Carribean with his late wife.

Lobue lives alone and prizes his independence. Like many seniors, he relies on a social services case manager who helps him acquire Meals on Wheels, healthcare and other necessities.

“If I call her, she comes right away,” Lobue said of his case manager. “She writes maybe four pages of notes — Do I eat right? Do I sleep right? Lists of all my medicines, everything.”

Lobue is a client of Services Now For Adult Persons, where case managers act as more than a lifeline to essential services. They are a link to the outside world, especially for the homebound, a friendly face who visits and calls regularly to make sure they are well.

“We love him,” Jacqueline Huneidi, SNAP’s director of case management, said of Lobue. “He’s an extremely friendly, wonderful man. He was here 100 years ago. He has seen New York grow and they have left him out in the cold, basically.”

Mayor Bloomberg plans to slash 30 percent of funding for elder social services, which means that at SNAP, for example, workers who typically handle about 70 to 75 cases each will now have to tackle 100 to 120 clients.

“It will be nearly impossible to provide the kind of services that these clients need,” Huneidi said. “They are frail and vulnerable and our mission is to keep them safe in their homes where they can age with dignity.”

SNAP serves 1,200 elders and has a long waiting list of more who would like to enroll. The budget cuts will only cause that list to grow as fewer are accepted. In addition, it will end up costing the city more in the long run, Huneidi said.

Seniors who are left unattended make more trips to the hospital and are likely to go into a nursing home sooner than those who have access to social services. The average cost of living in a nursing home is $8,000 to $10,000 per month, whereas case management only costs $80 to $85 per month per client, according to Huneidi.

“Our clients are mostly middle-class people,” she said. “They are not at the poverty level to get Medicaid, but they don’t have enough to cover the high costs of private home care, so they slip though the cracks.”

Unlike many seniors who live as long as Lobue, he has plenty of family members nearby, including a son, who lives on the second floor of his home. Aside from back pain, he is in relatively good health. He lives next door to a supermarket and he still drives occasionally.

But now this centenarian, who has been retired for several decades, is taking on a new job — advocating on behalf of elders.

He wrote a letter to Bloomberg praising SNAP and criticizing the cuts, something that was not lost on the organization’s staffers.

“I said please don’t cut the money for the elderly people — I wrote that in the letter,” Lobue recalled. “I brought it to the main office of SNAP on Winchester Boulevard and the social workers read it and they came and hugged me.”

The critical question remains, however, where cuts should be made. “That’s for the mayor to decide,” Lobue said throwing his hands in the air. “I don’t know.”

Huneidi said small cuts should be made across the board so each agency is impacted less and she was not the only one. Clifford Brody, of Washington, DC the caregiver for his 88-year-old uncle David Klein, who lives in New York City, wrote a letter to Bloomberg expressing a similar idea.

“The better solution, basic to Economics 101, is to shave 3 percent within each budgeted program to eliminate the city’s budget shortfall, rather than agency heads coming up with that 3 percent by ill-conceived slashing of some budget components, leaving others untouched, and thereby causing the city even greater budgetary shortfalls in the process as this 30 percent case management budget cut most certainly will,” Brody wrote.

The mayor has proposed significant cuts to nearly every city agency from the uniformed services like police and fire to libraries and youth and community development programs.

“We’ve kept the city’s financial house in order through these difficult times by planning ahead and never shying away from making the hard decisions, and our current budget remains balanced because of that sound approach,” Bloomberg said in a statement. “But we face a significant challenge for next year, as federal stimulus dollars run dry and the city still suffers from the impacts of the national economic downturn.”