Texas parents face pay cuts; foster kids' Social Security scandal; $199M boost for disabled students' career paths

Each week, we showcase a picture of real life from the Medical Motherhood community. If you’d like to participate, simply reply to this email. What do you want people to know about the #medicalmom life? Medical Motherhood’s news round upSnippets of news and opinion from outlets around the world. Click the links for the full story.• From The Texas Tribune: “Texas parents who care for their disabled children full time will lose money after pay raise”Inside an Austin high-rise north of the Texas Capitol in August, tearful parents lined up for a state health commission meeting to beg agency officials not to increase caretaking wages. It would backfire, they said. They would lose their livelihoods.In a city where state officials typically hear pleas for more funding, this group of parents — many who serve as primary caretakers for their physically and mentally disabled adult children — pushed for the opposite. Some testified in groups, with their children sitting next to them as they spoke. Raising the wage by a small amount would take away their ability to log overtime hours without making up for the difference, and they knew better than most: caretaking was never a 9-to-5 job.One parent who attended the meeting virtually broke down while sharing that she had to quit her job to start caring for her daughter, who was in a near-fatal car accident.“You're only one accident away from my life,” the parent, who introduced herself as Jayne Moorman, told Texas Health and Human Services Commission officials through sobs.Many of the group’s children depend on round-the-clock care paid for through a Medicaid waiver program known as Community Living Assistance and Support Services. This year’s state budget would slightly increase base caretaking wages, which advocates initially saw as a win after fighting to achieve it amid years of shortages, chaos and crises across the state’s Medicaid programs.But it carried an unintentional consequence: shuffling funds took money away from the overtime hours that make up a big chunk of caretaker salaries. And in this program, most of the caretakers were family members who made their sole living through it. […]State Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, said that when she pushed for minimum wage increases in the Texas House this year, no one brought forward this potential consequence. She said she originally had pushed for a $15 base wage, but $10.60 was the legislators’ compromise. Howard formerly worked as a critical care nurse.“You try to take a step forward, and it feels like you take at least another one or two steps backwards,” Howard said. “It was unintentional due to a lack of sufficient knowledge here on the part of legislators about how we need to address this. The service that these parents are providing is not only taking care of their family, but also reducing the overall cost of the state. And for us to not recognize that is dreadful. It's irresponsible.”Howard added she thought someone, especially the state agencies involved, should have notified legislators that this might happen.[…]• From NPR: “These kids used to get the bill for their own foster care. Now that's changing”To Teresa Casados, who runs the department in charge of child welfare in New Mexico, it seemed like an odd question. At a legislative hearing in July, a lawmaker asked her if the state was taking the Social Security checks of kids in foster care — the checks intended for orphans and disabled children."My reaction really was: That ca