Hi my name is Savannah Bosworth and I’ve already contacted about 12 reps today to help advocate for no IHSS overtime caps.

I am a provider for my son Hudson. He is a severely disabled 6 1/2-year-old. We rely on IHSS income heavily due to my sons’ severe needs.

Please help us advocate for no overtime caps. This will decrease our family income by about $2300. We could lose our home with a cut this significant.

Dear Committee, I am writing to you as a parent and full-time caregiver to plead for your help in stopping the proposed cuts to In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS). These cuts would devastate my family.

My son John is a minor child with profound special needs. He has Williams Syndrome, a traumatic brain injury (TBI), and profound autism. He is nonverbal and requires 24/7 care for all of his daily needs—eating, hygiene, safety, and emotional support. Due to the complexity of his condition, we cannot hire outside workers to care for him. I am his only consistent, trained, and trusted caregiver.

IHSS allows me to remain by (Johns) side and provide him with the care he needs to survive and live with dignity. If these services are cut, we will lose the support that helps us keep a roof over our heads. Quite frankly, we are already stretched to our limit—without IHSS, we risk losing our home and becoming homeless.

This is not an exaggeration—it’s our reality. I cannot abandon my child to enter the workforce; there is no one else who can safely care for him. Without IHSS, there is no safety net for us.

I urge you to consider the real human cost of these cuts. IHSS is not a luxury for families like mine—it is the only thing standing between survival and disaster. Reducing or eliminating this support will not save money in the long run. It will lead to increased hospitalizations, institutional care, and homelessness—all of which are far more costly to the state and far more damaging to vulnerable children and families.

Please oppose any and all cuts to IHSS. We need your advocacy and your vote to protect families who cannot speak for themselves. My son (John) cannot speak—but I can, and I am begging you to listen.

Thank you for your time and your commitment to the families you serve.

Sincerely, Jane Doe

IHSS is a life saver for me. Without our providers, I’d be dead already.

It’s such a special relationship that a lot of people have with their workers. I hope that we keep investing in this program. This is a rewarding field to get into and for the people that need them. This is really important to us.

IHSS was a life line for us, my parents and I. Would you rather see everybody be institutionalized or would you rather see them in the community? Because I’m sure every single person or mostly every person knows someone with a disability and something so simple as, I can’t get into my chair without help, do you push them into a nursing home or do we keep them at home? And I told them, put yourself in that situation. Put yourself and a family member, your most loved person, in that situation, would you push for them to be institutionalized? No! you would love this program because they’re able to care for them day to day. They are able to keep their integrity and dignity and be home.

IHSS is INCREDIBLY important. The idea of people being able to stay in their home, in the environment that they know, in the environment that they have connections to, even if it’s the cashier at the corner store or with the person that walks their dog and says hello, that’s the connection to the community that keeps people going. Its what keeps you motivated to live. Its what gives you independent.

How Medicaid Cuts Could Force Disabled Americans Into Institutions – The New York Times