Testimony from the LTCO Supporting Assembly Bill A3908 (Raising the Personal Needs Allowance
Delivered by Amy Brown, Policy Director, on behalf of Laurie Facciarossa Brewer, New Jersey’s Long-Term Care Ombudsman
Madame Chair, Committee Members — thank you for the opportunity to be here today to talk about Assembly Bill 3908 and the personal needs allowance, which is commonly known as the PNA.
I also want to thank Assembly members DePhillips and Barlas for introducing the bill and you, Madame Chair, for joining them as a primary sponsor.
This bill and the advocacy around it is the result of a grass-roots effort led by nursing home residents. They reached out to our staff for technical assistance and support, but the idea and the passion behind it comes from the residents themselves.
For anyone in the room who is not familiar, the PNA is the money that Medicaid-eligible residents get to keep every month from their Medicaid benefits to buy things that are not provided by the nursing home.
This is not just spending money for fun, extra stuff. We expect residents to use these funds for basic personal needs like:
- —Haircuts
- —Clothing
- —Shoes
- —Food and snacks that are not on the nursing home menu…and many others.
If the nursing home does not directly provide it or if the options don’t meet the resident’s needs, the resident has to use their PNA money.
And how much is the PNA for residents? $50 a month. It’s less than $2 a day.
Honestly I don’t know if that’s sad or laughable. $50. In New Jersey. We are among the five most expensive states to live in in the country. Yet 26 other states and Washington, D.C. provide a higher PNA for residents than we do.
A woman’s haircut at a salon will typically cost $50 or more. That’s your entire month’s budget gone in one day. For a man, a haircut may only cost half as much but it still leaves him with very little money to get through the rest of the month.
The result is that many residents skip it, or they save up and splurge once every few months. People don’t stop caring about how they look when they move into a nursing home. They want to feel good about themselves and their appearance, and they should be able to take a trip to the salon or the barber shop without breaking the bank.
Food is another important way that resident spend their PNA funds. The quality and variety of food that many nursing homes provide is lacking, to put it mildly. Residents want to go out for a meal or order takeout sometimes. Some residents buy vitamins and supplements because the nursing home food is not as nutritious as they’re used to. But they can’t really afford these things unless they give up something else.
Residents across the state are forced into hard choices to make $50 last. Our staff and Volunteers see it all the time. Residents…
- —who can’t afford new glasses.
- —who skip bus trips and outings because their PNA was spent on necessities.
- —who have to choose between a pair of shoes or new bras.
- —who spend their entire PNA for the month on Adult Pull-Ups because they don’t like the supplies that the nursing home provides.
The bill before you would increase the PNA to $140 per month and set up automatic cost-of-living adjustments each year. This is important because it will ensure that the residents don’t have to revisit this time and time again as the cost of living goes up.
In the end, this is about the dignity and well-being of the residents. They deserve the freedom to lead the lives they want for themselves. We should not force them into hard choices that chip away at their quality of life.
This is also a small but very important part of a larger effort to make nursing homes better, more person-centered places for the people who live there.
Thank you, again, Madame Chair and committee members, for the opportunity to speak today. We thank you so much for your commitment to people living in long-term care facilities in our state and we urge you to move this legislation forward.
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