Rachel Homme sat in the sun on a recent afternoon, waiting for her ride home. She still had purple and blue paint on her hands from a finger painting session.
Homme, 45, is mostly blind and has a mental disability. She’s been a regular at the Full Life Care center in Everett for a little over a year, participating in programming activities that are pretty fun, she told KUOW.
“There’s one activity I never really cared for … and that’s bingo. Just because you have to see to do it,” she said. She added that she’s warmed up to bingo, a little, since the staff at the center help her out, acting as an extra set of eyes.
Homme is one of more than 100 adults with disabilities who come to this center for several hours a day each week. Programming includes social activities like bingo, trivia, and painting, as well as a menu of health services like skilled nursing and occupational therapy.
But after operating for more than two decades, the center is slated to close this summer. Clients like Homme who have come to rely on the center as a routine source of human connection are devastated.
“I’m really sad because it’s the only place I have to go,” Homme said.
A statement from management of the center blames the closure on inadequate funding from the state. Cuts made in the state’s budget this year haven’t helped.
While the closure in Everett is new, the problem of fully funding these facilities has been growing for years. Eight similar centers across the state have closed since 2018, according to staff from Full Life. After the Everett location closes, Snohomish County – Washington’s third most populous county – won’t have any other facilities like it, according to state officials. Less than a dozen will be left statewide.
The COVID pandemic spurred some of those closures, according to Susan Worthington with the state Department of Social and Health Services. Volunteers stopped coming, donations dried up, and things got more expensive, Worthington said.
“COVID just really, really put the stopper on this whole thing, and they haven't recovered from that,” Worthington said.
Providers of these services say the problem largely centers around unequal funding across counties, combined with years of stagnant Medicaid funding. Advocates say running these services in Snohomish County costs more than in King County – but King County providers still get paid at a higher rate.
State lawmakers boosted funding for adult day health centers in 2024, but not as much as advocates had hoped. This year, lawmakers didn’t increase Medicaid funding for these facilities at all as they wrangled a multibillion dollar budget gap.
“It was very challenging to give increases this year when we needed to reduce the overall budget by billions of dollars,” said state Sen. June Robinson, a Democrat who represents the district where the Everett day center is closing.
Robinson, who also chairs the state senate’s powerful budget committee, said she’s sad to see the center shut down, but she’s not sure when the state might be in a position to provide additional Medicaid increases.
“I don’t know what our budget situation is going to be a year or two years from now,” Robinson said. “We are certainly moving into a time of less money being available.”
Making matters more uncertain, the federal government is considering major changes to Medicaid. It’s unclear at the moment if those changes would impact these services.
For now, staff at the center in Everett are trying to find any option they can to prevent the closure, though that’s a tall order. Management says they’re ending the center’s operations July 19.
So people like Rachel Homme have few options ahead.
“I’m not able to get out because of my disabilities, so I’m not sure what’s going to happen next,” Homme said.
She’ll have to decide to either travel for hours to try to access these same services and activities farther away, or just stay home.
