Changes to Arizona's new developmental disability assessment receive bipartisan support

A Republican lawmaker who helped preserve a program for Arizona children with disabilities earlier this year says she is encouraged by changes the state is making to a new tool that threatened to cut back on those services.

When the Division of Developmental Disabilities faced a budget crisis this year, Rep. Julie Willoughby (R-Chandler) helped negotiate a compromise between GOP lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to send emergency funding to the program.

Part of that deal required the state to create a new tool to assess children’s eligibility and the services they should receive.

But in the weeks before the tool went live on Oct. 1, parents expressed concerns that it ignored individual circumstances and could cut back on services.

At the time, Willoughby, a nurse by training, said she shared those concerns and felt some of the tools’ parameters were arbitrary and didn’t follow standard health care ratings.

“It felt like there wasn't a lot of transparency in the end result and how these results came to be,” she said.

But Willoughby said changes to the tool announced by Hobbs last week are a good first step to addressing those concerns. That includes delaying any cuts in services that resulted from the new assessment and allowing families to seek an "extraordinary review process” that will allow them to seek exceptions.

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“So I think going back and being able to do an exception based off of a disagreement is a huge, important process, because there's no way for you to get it right — one answer is not the same for each individual person,” she said.

Families have also praised the changes, which went into effect immediately after the state’s Medicaid agency used emergency rulemaking powers that allowed it to bypass a more lengthy process typically required by law.

“This emergency rulemaking process will be followed by regular rulemaking to ensure there is public comment to finalize these changes,” according to the governor’s office.

Willoughby said the initial adoption of the assessment tool felt like a “rush.”

“It sounds like, from my understanding, that they're really going to reconvene a work group with parents of disabled kids, providers that help support the disabled community, so that we're all coming back to the table,” she said. “I have high hopes that it will be a better outcome than this last one, and I think this will help relieve a lot of anxiety that the families were feeling about this tool and the uncertainty that it was going to present.”

She said the deal that lawmakers and Hobbs agreed to included important safeguards to ensure the viability of the program moving forward, including putting a 40-hour-per-week limit on a program that pays parents as caregivers.

“So we know that there has to be some guardrails, if you will, put on to make sure that everyone's getting the proper care and that there's no improper use of it,” Willoughby said. “But it all comes down to making sure that those that need it are being cared for, and I think that's the basis of where we should go back to with this tool, and that was the point of the tool in the first place.”