Medicare Home Care - independent?

[Scheater5]

Short version: Does anyone know the process for becoming an independent care provider paid through Medicare/Medicaid, as opposed to going through a company? If not, could anyone recommend a better place/forum to ask?

So, my wife is the private tutor/caregiver for a high school-age student diagnosed with moderately-severe Autism, along with several associated syndromes. She has been privately hired by the family, but due to several factors the family is now going to have government supplements pay for the student's individualized care.

So my wife has signed up with a company to do basically the job she has always been doing (picking him up from school, taking him to therapists, preparing lunch - he feeds himself but needs help with food preparation and healthy choices, and tutoring both academic and social - all of this in a classroom at our home - before returning him to his family home) only through the company. The problem is that the company (Rescare) is paying her about half of what the family used to pay.

My wife is highly qualified - and though she doesn't have like nursing certification or anything like that, she has a number of certifications related to disability care and is willing to meet other requirements. If anyone has any information about how she could become an independent healthcare provider through Medicare/Medicaid, I would be eternally grateful.

Thank you all

 

[BraidedPony]

I just Googled how to become a certified medicare provider and a ton of dot gov sites resulted.

 

[Scheater5]

So I had definitely tried googling medicare provider, but alas my state's website is....less than well designed.

But I think I finally found how to start the process. I STILL can't find good information about what certifications are necessary, or what paperwork needs to be in order - like, do they let just anyone that applies get paid if a Medicaid-recipient family says they want to hire them? That seems unlikey. But that's what the application process seems like so far. We'll see if this first step (NPI number application) goes through.

 

[TempeFan]

I was hired by the state of WV to do that job. They said they would pay me minimum wage $7.25/hr as required by law. They paid less than $2 for direct care work and zero for all the administrative tasks and travel and staff meetings and calls in the middle of the night and paperwork. It was quite a nghtmare.
Medicare is federal and does not cover long term type care for anyone who is not bed ridden. Medicaid is a state program which varies widely from state to state. If the patient qualifies for state aid. The state assigns what agency administers the funds and provides the worker unless the patient/gaurdian reads the fine print and choses the option to self administer. Either way the funds are limited to way less than reasonable or even legal amount in most states in the US.

 

[Scheater5]

I'm sorry to hear about that situation, TempeFan. It sounds a lot like what my wife is going through.

However, thank you for pointing me towards the idea of self administered medicaid. My wife has worked with this family for many years and they very much want her to stay on with their son, and also for my wife to be paid well even though they cannot afford it now. They may well be willing to do something like this - I do not know all the details, but it is something for my wife to discuss with the family now. Greatly appreciated.