Association honors Haugen for her work to repeal nursing home bed tax

OLYMPIA – When the Legislature proposed a daily tax on nursing home patients in 2003, Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen, D-Camano Island, was one of a handful of senators who voted against it. After the tax passed despite her opposition, Haugen persuaded her colleagues in 2005 to approve a bill phasing out the tax by 2011. Earlier this year, anxious to remove the tax even sooner, she sold them on a bill to repeal the tax as of July 1, 2007.

In recognition of those efforts, Haugen was today named Legislator of the Year by the Washington Association of Housing and Services for the Aging (WAHSA) at a conference at Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue.

“Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen’s commitment to reversing this injustice, with tenacity and compassion for our seniors, deserves our deepest appreciation and gratitude,” WAHSA Executive Director Deb Murphy said in presenting the award. “This relieves a significant financial burden on our mostly private-pay, middle-income seniors who have saved all of their lives so that they wouldn’t be a burden to the state. Mary Margaret has been quite the champion on behalf of our seniors.”

When the tax was first proposed in the 2003 budget, Haugen was outraged.

“The bed tax to me was the worst thing the Legislature ever enacted,” said Haugen, a lifelong resident of the 10th Legislative District. “It’s just unacceptable to tax people in a nursing home — private-pay patients — to pay for people who couldn’t pay. I have many nursing homes in my district, and the people in those homes are not faceless. They’re people I have known my whole life.”

Neva Sullivan, whose husband is in the Josephine Sunset Home in Stanwood, testified repeatedly on behalf of Haugen’s bills. She and her husband are both retired, on fixed incomes.

“It has been a burden, monthly, to have that included in the large amount of money that we pay to keep him there,” Sullivan said. “When I got my first bill when he entered there, I said, ‘What is a bed tax?’ I found out private-pay patients who had no voice had been chosen to make up a budget deficit in Olympia. That didn’t seem fair to me. We were paying our own way; we were not a burden on society.”

Sullivan, whose monthly bed tax payment was lowered this year from $220 to $187 by Haugen’s 2005 bill, said “a year from now I’ll be very grateful not to be paying that tax. We felt voiceless in that decision, but we got a voice in changing it thanks to Mary Margaret.”

When the tax was first created, Haugen said, its proponents “kept saying the industry supported it. Well, the industry may have supported it, but somebody needed to talk to the people who paid it. That’s who I was listening to.”

Haugen calls the award “a real honor” and said she was flattered to receive it. But she also said the award belongs to “the people who took the time to come to Olympia to testify and put a face on this issue.”

“This tax hit seniors who had saved responsibly for their long-term care, and none of this money actually went to the nursing home care and reimbursement, it was just put in the general fund,” said WAHSA spokesperson Suzie Tracey. “Sen. Haugen’s passion was so wonderful. She’s amazingly dedicated to this issue.”

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