Ballot Initiative 2124, sponsored by hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, may sound reasonable—make our state long-term care insurance program optional—but its real impact would be to bankrupt the program.

If approved, I-2124 will eliminate benefits for nearly 4 million Washingtonians—benefits that help pay for home modifications, medical equipment, and home care aides. I-2124 will leave more people with no option but to drain our life savings, even sign over our homes, to qualify for taxpayer-funded Medicaid coverage when the need for help with daily activities like dressing, bathing, getting around, and managing meals or medication comes along. I-2124 will increase costs for middle-income families and increase health care costs for everyone as more people without the support they need at home cycle in and out of hospital emergency rooms for preventable falls, missed medication, and dehydration.

With 25 years’ experience in the field of caregiving, I can attest that families struggle to keep their loved ones at home for as long as possible, both because that’s where most of us want to be, and because it’s less expensive than a residential facility. But because most long-term care expenses aren’t covered by Medicare or health insurance, seniors and disabled people are making choices they should not have to make: pay for medication, help from a home care aide, or keep the heat on.

The backers of Initiative 2124 say we should get private insurance. But there’s a reason only 3% of Americans own long term care insurance policies. It’s extremely expensive, $8,000 a year for a 55-year-old couple, with premiums required after we retire and are on a fixed income. Private insurance companies routinely jack up premiums without warning, delay and deny claims, reject people with cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure and other preexisting conditions—at least 50% of us—and discriminate against women by charging them more than men.

Washington’s long term care insurance program provides workers with a significant benefit that most businesses can’t or don’t provide to their staff. By taking away this benefit, I-2124 hurts small businesses and workers alike. Businesses are struggling to find and keep workers. At our home care agency, we have more than 900 employees providing care in client homes, but we’re always hiring, because there’s a severe caregiver shortage, especially in rural areas across central and Eastern Washington where people are more isolated, drive times are longer, and folks’ kids are moving away from the small towns they grew up in.

Today, 1 in 4 workers, most often women, are scaling back or leaving their job to care for family members. More than 800,000 Washingtonians are unpaid family caregivers, labor valued at more than $16 billion a year. By destroying the benefit fund that can pay for home care aides, medical equipment and home modifications, help with meals and transportation, more workers will have no choice but to quit their jobs.

In the last two years, lawmakers strengthened our long term care program by covering near retirees and part time workers, and making our benefits portable so we can keep them even if we move out of state someday. But instead of continuing to strengthen and improve the state’s long term care benefit program, I-2124 would destroy it.

I know what a lifeline Washington’s long term care benefit is going to be for me and my children. I hope you’ll join me in voting No on I-2124.

Misty Dawn Turner is the Area Agency Director for Addus HomeCare and lives in Kennewick, Washington.