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Secretary of Health and Human Services Marylou Sudders talks to reporters after a Health Connector board meeting on Feb. 12, 2015.

(SHIRA SCHOENBERG / THE REPUBLICAN)

BOSTON -- Gov. Charlie Baker's administration has backed off from proposed changes that would have raised eligibility standards for people with disabilities to qualify for certain state-funded Medicaid programs. After the legislature refused to include language in a budget bill allowing Baker to make the changes, Secretary of Health and Human Services Marylou Sudders told advocates Friday that Baker would not resurrect the plan in 2015 or in the budget for 2016.

"The administration informed us that these cuts were off the table for fiscal year 2015 and fiscal year 2016," said Al Norman, executive director of Mass Home Care, which provides care at home to elderly people, including 20,000 who are on MassHealth, the state's Medicaid program that covers certain low-income individuals.

Rhonda Mann, a spokesperson for the Executive Office of Health and Human Services, confirmed that after the Legislature scrapped Baker's proposal for this year, Sudders decided not to revive it.

"What the secretary said is we're done trying to think about this in 2015, because it's been taken off the table. And for 2016 as well, we will not touch these programs," Mann said.

Baker, in a bill filling a budget gap for the current fiscal year, had proposed language giving him unilateral authority to restructure MassHealth benefits to the extent allowed by federal law. More than 40 advocates representing seniors, people with disabilities and health care workers, wrote a letter to Baker and legislative leaders opposing the change.

The state spends around $14 billion a year on MassHealth. The advocates, in their letter, expressed concern that restructuring benefits could lead to a loss of federal reimbursement money and could significantly affect MassHealth patients.

"We cannot support such a transfer of power away from the General Court to the Executive Branch, especially when it concerns the lives of many people with disabilities in the Commonwealth," they wrote. "There need to be checks and balances to ensure that the mission of MassHealth to care for people in the least-restrictive setting is not transformed -- that homelessness and institutionalization are not increased, as may result from planned cuts to (personal care attendants) and (adult foster care) services."

The House and Senate stripped the MassHealth language from the versions of the budget bill they passed.

Baker administration officials did not publicize how they planned to use the authority they asked for in the bill. But Norman said administration officials told them in a Feb. 4 conference call that they planned to save the state $6 million by raising the bar on how disabled a person must be to qualify for a personal care attendant or for adult foster care programs, in which disabled adults are placed either with a family or in an assisted living facility.

Eligibility for those programs is determined by how many tasks of daily living a person needs help with, and the administration wanted to increase the number of daily tasks required to get into the programs.

Norman said 6,000 people in adult foster care would have lost their placements under the proposed standards. He did not know how many people would have lost personal care attendants. Mann said the Office of Health and Human Services did not calculate how many people would have lost services.

"We couldn't believe these cuts should be on the list," Norman said.

Mann said she did not know what led Sudders to change her mind between the time she proposed the change and Friday's meeting with the seven advocacy groups. But, she said, "I wouldn't discount the role of the advocates....They did play an important role in coming forward and talking about the importance of these programs."

Separately, Norman said Sudders told the groups that she wanted to have a statewide conversation about how to change the way services are delivered under MassHealth.

Sudders and Baker have both stressed the importance of reforms that will lower the cost of Medicaid. Medicaid spending in Massachusetts has grown by 10 or 11 percent each of the last two years.

Sudders said last week that she wants to have a "sustainable" Medicaid program by fiscal year 2017. She suggested that the administration will look at how to change service delivery, for example by moving away from a fee-for-service model and toward a model where insurers are paid to keep a population of people healthy.