Only about half of U.S. states offered hazard or sick pay to direct care workers in the first 18 months of the pandemic. According to a study released Tuesday by PHI National, 24 states and the District of Columbia had policies to support frontline direct care staff, while 26 states had no policies at all.
In an analysis of hazard pay and sick leave policies in all 50 states from March 2020 through August 2021, PHI found 17 states implemented at least one hazard pay policy affecting direct care workers and four states implemented new sick leave plans. Fourteen states already had sick leave or general paid leave in place and four amended or supplemented existing policies.
Six states implemented one-time bonus payments, ranging from $250 to just over $2,200, while 11 implemented hourly wage increases or weekly bonuses, ranging from $2 to $5 and $100 to $500, respectively. Nevada handed out one-time bonus checks of $500 to direct care workers last February. New York followed suit in April, approving $1.2 billion in bonuses and wage increases for its frontline healthcare workers.
Still, PHI noted the number of states that did nothing for frontline direct care workers was troubling. Kezia Scales, PHI national senior director of policy research and one of the study’s authors, told McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse that the failure of more than half the states to adopt policies supporting direct care workers during the pandemic could be one reason so many of those workers exited their jobs over the past two years.
“Inadequate hazard pay and paid sick leave during the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced direct care workers’ economic precarity and signaled that society continues to disregard their contributions — which in turn has driven many of them out of the field,” Scales explained.
During the pandemic states received several infusions of federal funds to bolster their Medicaid programs, including the Families First Coronavirus Response Act in 2020 and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. But the study found that fewer than half of home- and community-based services providers registered for Medicare and Medicaid were able to access funding through the Paycheck Protection Program or the Health Care Enhancement Act and Consolidated Appropriations Act to address workforce issues.
