Health

A healthcare organization with thousands of patients in Southeast Alaska expects a massive hit to its budget.

The head of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, or SEARHC, says it’s the result of federal spending cuts known as sequestration.

CEO Charles Clement says his organization is bracing for a $3.5 million budget cut over the next six months.

“There is no possible way for SEARHC to absorb this amount of reduction,” he said.

Clement says the reduced funding is because of sequestration, which went into effect on March 1 when Congress could not reach an agreement on the nation’s budget. SEARHC receives a large percentage of its funding from the federal government.

Clement writes that he’s traveling this week to meet with the Indian Health Service and other tribal health organizations about sequestration. And he says SEARHC executives are working with the board of directors to figure out what to do.

“What I can tell you,” Clement writes in an email, “is that budget changes of this magnitude are beyond my authority to decide.”

He says nothing has been decided so far, but that difficult decisions are on the way.

SEARHC is Southeast Alaska’s largest private employer. It provides health services to Alaska Natives and other beneficiaries at its hospital campus in Sitka and through providers in Juneau. It also works in smaller communities throughout the panhandle.

 

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CEO: SEARHC hit hard by federal funding cut

Alaska Catholic bishops say the election of a pope from Latin America provides a fresh beginning for the Catholic Church.

As Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected yesterday (Wednesday), Alaska’s bishops were in Juneau for the annual meeting of the Alaska Conference of Catholic Bishops. They also planned meetings with members of the Parnell administration and legislators.

The mid-morning announcement of a new pope was greeted with the ringing of bells at Juneau’s downtown Cathedral of the Nativity. At noon, Archbishop Roger Schweitz of Anchorage, Bishop Donald Kettler of Fairbanks and Bishop Edward Burns of Juneau held a thanksgiving Mass for the election of Pope Francis.

 

About 200 people attended the dedication of a new warming shelter at Juneau’s Twin Lakes on Saturday.

The 14 x 24 foot cedar cabin was built to honor John Caouette, a longtime Juneau resident who passed away in 2010.

Caouette was an avid skater and hockey player, and Twin Lakes was one of his favorite places to lace up the skates. Friends and family raised the funds and donated time and labor to build the shelter, located on the southern end of Twin Lakes just after you turn in to the parking lot.

Caouette’s mother, Mary Gorzycki, and widow, Rebecca Braun, were among those who spoke at the dedication. Several friends and family members from his home state of Minnesota made the trip to Juneau for the event.

Caouette died in an accidental fall in Minneapolis while visiting family in October 2010. He was just 46 years old.

He moved to Juneau in the early ’90s to work for the U.S. Forest Service. He later worked as a research scientist for the Nature Conservancy, where his studies of the Tongass National Forest were described as “cutting edge” by colleagues.

For the past two days, the House Finance Committee has heard testimony on what it should cut from the operating budget and, especially, what it shouldn’t. Opposition has been especially vocal when it comes to an $8.4 million reduction in behavioral health funding.

Kathi Collum serves on the board of Juneau Youth Services, an organization that receives state grants. Her son also received treatment there.

“As a child, my oldest son was a little bit difficult, the proverbial wild child. As he grew into his teens, it escalated to the point where we began to fear for our own safety. At that point we took him for an assessment to Juneau Youth Services, and he was diagnosed with oppositional defiance disorder,” Collum says.

Collum urged the finance committee to keep funding for behavioral and mental health at the levels set by the governor’s budget. She says that the money spent on her son benefited him — and the state.

“I feel that a year at Miller House is what prevented my son from becoming another faceless number in an overcrowded prison system,” Collum says.

The $8.4 million cut isn’t from any specific program: It’s getting rid of a pot of money that hasn’t actually been allocated. The concern is that by removing it from the budget, it could lower the base funding level for behavioral health in future years.

Rep. Lindsey Holmes, an Anchorage Republican, says that the committee is focused on tightening the budget in the face of a deficit, but that they are taking the public’s testimony very seriously.

“We hope people keep in mind that I know that there are certain changes that have been made to the budget that have a lot of people concerned. It is a long process. This is one of the very early stages,” Holmes says.

The finance committee is expected to start taking amendments on budget as soon as Monday.

 

Watch the testimony (Courtesy Gavel Alaska)

Poor adults who live in states that don’t go along with the federal health overhaul’s expansion of Medicaid expansion face a double whammy.

They can’t take advantage of the law’s widened eligibility standards allowing individuals with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level ($15,856 in 2013) to sign up for Medicaid. But they’re also not likely to qualify for subsidized coverage on the new state-based health insurance exchanges set to open in January because, ironically, they’re too poor.

Premium tax credits will be limited to individuals with incomes between 100 and 400 percent of the poverty level ($11,490 to $45,960 in 2013).

Without financial help, coverage is likely to be unaffordable for many people living below the poverty level, says Edwin Park, vice president for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

More than 11 million uninsured adults could fall into this neither/nor category, according to an estimate published by the Urban Institute last year.

To date, about half the governors have announced that they want to move ahead with Medicaid expansion.

Many people assume that state Medicaid programs typically cover people up to the poverty level, says Park. Although that’s true for children, he says, for their parents and other adults that isn’t the case.

Medicaid eligibility levels vary widely by state, but typically only very poor adults qualify for coverage. Last year, for example, the median eligibility threshold for working parents was 63 percent of the federal poverty level and 37 percent of poverty for jobless parents, according research by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (KHN is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

Under current Medicaid rules, childless adults are in the toughest spot.

“In a large majority of states, an adult without children who’s not disabled isn’t eligible at all for Medicaid,” says Park.

 

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A Costly Catch-22 In States Forgoing Medicaid Expansion

So far, eight Republican governors have decided to split with their party and accept federal funding for Medicaid expansion in their states. Today, Sean Parnell announced that he won’t be joining them — at least for now.

On Thursday, Parnell said that he will not ask legislators to put any money toward broadening the health program and opening it up to more low-income Alaskans. His concern is that the federal government could end up reneging on promised funds, given the current fiscal climate in Washington.

“So if we expand the Medicaid population and the federal government fails to keep its financial commitment, the state would likely have to backfill forward-lost federal dollars to cover beneficiaries of the expansion and to protect the health coverage of everyone currently in the program,” said Parnell.

Parnell plans to revisit the prospect of Medicaid expansion in December, when he rolls out his annual budget proposal.

If Medicaid were expanded in the state, it’s projected that it would extend coverage to 40,000 Alaskans. Under a provision of the Affordable Care Act, the federal government will cover the full cost of growing the program for the first three years. After that, the state share would gradually go up to 10 percent.

Because the federal government will start offering extra money for Medicaid expansion in January, putting off a decision on the program means that Alaska will be opting out of that funding for the first six months that it is available.