The App That Proves You Showed Up

Ohio spent the summer arguing about who counts as a caregiver. A bill moving through the statehouse in June would have ended Medicaid payments to family members outright, roughly 7,000 people caring for someone at home. Disabled Ohioans and their advocates testified. Representative Jason Stephens said the family caregiver piece was never part of the fraud, that he was not sure how it got in there or why, and that he was glad it was out. The provision came out.

What got signed in July was Senate Bill 315, and it keeps the rest. Electronic visit verification, provider inspections, stiffer penalties, Medicaid fraud folded into Ohio's corrupt activities law. EVV is the part families should read twice, because for most of them it will be the only caregiving technology they are ever required to use. It does not help with the medications, or the falls, or the drive to dialysis. It proves someone was in the room.

The sharpest objection came from Stephens himself. A good portion of his district, he said, is territory where EVV may or may not work, depending on which side of the hill you are on and where the cellphone antenna is. So the one piece of care technology the state will require is also the piece that stops working over a ridge. Families there will still be caring. They will just be failing to prove it.

That is a strange thing to build first. Indiana capped paid relatives at forty hours a week on August 1. Ohio pointed a verification app at the kitchen. Two states, one season, and in both the technology that arrived was aimed at the caregiver rather than at the care.

The rest is buried and worth saying plainly. Families testified, and the worst provision came out of the bill. Showing up still moves things.