If you are the parent, sibling, or legal guardian who gets paid to provide your family member's waiver services in Indiana, today is the day a set of new rules started governing what you can bill for. The Bureau of Disabilities Services amendments to the Community Integration and Habilitation, Family Supports, Health and Wellness, and Traumatic Brain Injury waivers took effect August 1. They touch four things at once: which services a relative can be paid for, how many hours, what a live-in caregiver's rate is, and who your case manager works for.

None of this is the bigger overhaul the state calls Waiver Reset. Indiana's own fact sheets describe these amendments as preparation for that redesign, which arrives later and will rebuild the waiver structure itself.

The Payment List Got Shorter

The clearest change is a closed list. On the Family Supports Waiver, Indiana will now pay a relative or legal guardian only for Respite, Participant Assistance and Care, Transportation, and Workplace Assistance. On the CIH Waiver, the list is Residential Habilitation and Support in both its hourly and daily forms, plus Respite, Structured Family Caregiving, Transportation, and Workplace Assistance. The fact sheets state it plainly: payment will not be made to relatives or legal guardians for any other service.

The restriction bites if your service plan currently pays you for something outside those lists. Day Habilitation and Wellness Coordination are the examples most likely to affect a household, because a relative who has been delivering and billing for one of them no longer can. The service itself does not disappear from the plan. What changes is that someone outside the family has to provide it.

The Forty-Hour Cap, and Who It Applies To

The amendments also cap reimbursed hours. On the CIH Waiver, hours of RHS Hourly, Respite, and Workplace Assistance combined cannot exceed forty per week for each paid relative or legal guardian. On Family Supports, the same forty-hour weekly ceiling covers Participant Assistance and Care, Respite, and Workplace Assistance combined.

The parenthetical in the state's own language reverses what much of the early coverage reported. The cap applies to relatives and legal guardians who are not Legally Responsible Individuals. An LRI in Indiana means a parent of a minor child or a spouse. So a grandmother, an adult sibling, or a guardian who is not the parent of a minor is the person the forty-hour ceiling was written for. If you have been told the cap applies to you because you are a parent, ask your case manager to point to the provision, because the fact sheet says the opposite.

What Happened to the Live-In Rate

Indiana published reduced reimbursement rates that apply when the paid caregiver lives in the same home as the person receiving services. IHCP bulletin BT202673, issued May 14, set them for dates of service on or after August 1: Attendant Care at $7.75 per fifteen minutes on the Health and Wellness, PathWays, and TBI waivers, Participant Assistance and Care at $30.71 per hour on Family Supports, and RHS Hourly on CIH at $30.64 for Level 1 and $28.86 for Level 2.

The state's reasoning is narrow. The reduction removes the portion of the rate built to cover staff travel time and mileage to and from a worksite, on the logic that a caregiver who lives in the home does not make that trip. FSSA wrote that the adjustment "is not intended to, and should not, reduce caregiver hourly wages," and that mileage for community access stays in the rate.

That sentence is a statement of intent directed at agencies, not a guarantee to your paycheck. The rate is what the state pays the provider. What the provider pays you is a separate conversation, and it is worth having with your employer this week rather than discovering the answer on a pay stub. Families in other states have been through this: Colorado halved paid family caregiver hours with Ohio and Pennsylvania moving in the same direction.

Your Case Manager May Work Somewhere Else Now

Indiana also consolidated case management to five organizations statewide as of today: Aging and In-Home Services of Northeast Indiana, Indiana Professional Management Group, Inspire Case Management, Unity of Indiana, and The Columbus Organization. Families whose organization was not selected had a window from June 1 to July 15 to choose a replacement, and anyone who did not choose was assigned one.

You can change your case management organization at any time, for any reason. A pick list of approved organizations comes from your local BDS office or your current organization. Case notes now have to be completed within seven calendar days of the activity they describe, which gives you a concrete standard to hold a new case manager to when you ask for documentation.

What to Confirm This Week

Pull your current service plan and read the service names against the payment lists above. If a service you provide is not on your waiver's list, ask your case manager in writing what the plan is for covering it, and by when. The provider enrollment freeze that started the same day means the pool of agencies available to fill that gap is not growing for at least six months, so an early ask has better odds than an August one.

Confirm in writing which organization now holds your case management, and get your case manager's name and direct contact. Ask your employing agency whether the live-in rate change alters your wage, and ask for the answer in writing.

Questions on the waiver rules themselves go to BDS.Help@fssa.in.gov, and The Arc of Indiana takes calls from families at 317-977-2375. If the payment restrictions hit your household hard, the question of whether parents of minor children can be paid at all is being litigated nationally, and Indiana households would feel that outcome directly. For now, the households in the strongest position are the ones holding a current service plan, a named case manager, and a written answer about their own rate.