Long Term Care Funding Stripped by Budget Committees for Further Discussion
The road to adequate funding for long term care programs hit a bump in the road this week as both the House and Senate budget committees refused to include long term care funding recommendations in their budget bills.
The House Appropriations Committee refused to adopt any of the Social Service Budget recommendations for KDADS and stated that they would hold off consideration of that funding until next week, when the committee will have a global perspective on the budget after the higher education funding request and tax cut proposals are submitted for consideration.
After initially adopting their subcommittee funding recommendations for social services, the Senate Ways and Means Committee went back and specifically deleted the nursing facility funding requests from their budget bill. The committee Chairman assured the committee members that nursing facility funding would be discussed further during budget negotiations with the House at the end of the month.
During the Ways and Means Committee meeting, Senate President Ty Masterson stated that the decision to remove funding from the budget bill, including nursing facility Medicaid increases, was due to political games being played between Governor Kelly and Senate leadership. Masterson said that the Governor purposely underfunds social services in her budget in order to force the conservative legislature to spend more government money than she does. He indicated that unless the Governor agrees to amend her budget to add in more dollars for nursing facilities and other programs, the Senate may not add any dollars either.
Next steps: The long term care associations will continue the fight next week to educate budget committee members on the long term care crisis in our state, and the dire financial needs of our providers and the Kansans they serve. If you have a representative or senator on budget committees, please keep a look out for emails asking you to continue making your voice heard over the next couple of weeks.
Bill Tracker
SB 6 Restricting the authority of the secretary of health and environment and local health officers to prevent the introduction and spread of infectious or contagious diseases.
SB 62 Enacting the protect vulnerable adults from financial exploitation act.
SB 277 Regulation of temporary health care staffing agencies
HB 2023 Creating the crime of interference with the conduct of a health care facility
HB 2264 Enacting the patient right to visitation act to require patient care facilities to adopt visitation rules to allow certain relatives and other persons, including clergy, to visit terminally ill patients and other patients making major medical decisions
HB 2292 Establishing tax credit and grant program to support health care apprenticeship programs
HB 2408 Exempting certain services provided in an adult care home from board of cosmetology and barbering oversight
