by Federally financed community health centers in at least 10 states experience delays that have access to their funds, forcing some people to close and others to consider, different officials PBS News say.
PBS has confirmed that health centers in Arizona, Virginia, Maine, Nebraska, Illinois, Michigan, Vermont, Rhode Island, Montana and Minnesota were unable, at least temporarily, to gain access to funds. The centers of Maine and Montana receive their financing again.
Vacheria Keys, the Associate Vice President of Policy and Regulatory Affairs at the National Association of Community Health Centers, said that the delays started last Tuesday after the administration had issued a memo with a general freezing of subsidy financing, which was later withdrawn. Two federal judges have blocked the freezing until a lawsuit goes forward.
Health centers for the community see more than 32 million people a year, including one in five national Americans, according to Advocates for Community Health (ACH), a non -party -related membership organization of health centers for communities. More than 500,000 people work in these centers throughout the country, said it in a statement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QPSNSZIT4U
Lisa Desjardins reports on the destabilizing effect that the financing has had on a wide range of programs despite court interventions.
“Health centers for the community offer high-quality primary and preventive care, dental care, behavioral health and substance use disorders and cheap prescription medicines,” it wrote. “When health centers close, people with chronic disorders miss agreements, pregnant women miss prenatal visits and behavioral health services are interrupted, aggravating results and increase the costs for the entire health care system.”
CHCS, who receive a combination of federal subsidy money, medicaid fees and private insurance, usually draw their federal funds on a monthly basis, log in to a portal to request the promotion. But for those centers that experience delays, the portal shows their request as ‘pending’.
“Many health centers have limited money at hand, and many of them rely on being able to regulate access to federal financing, it is like a bank account. They use it to be able to do payroll administrative, administrative things. But this is a process that has never really been disturbed to this level, “said Keys.
Although Keys did not speculate about why this happened, she said that leaders of the Community Health Center had rushed to the site throughout the country to try to sign all their funds before the financing from 5 pm was freezing. There is usually not such a deadline to subtract funds.
This does not happen with all health centers for the community; Some have had access to their federal funds without any problems. The bottom line is that civil servants do not know why this happens at all, or why it happens to some centers and not with others, and they say that officials from the agency did not respond very much in explaining why.
“We understand that some users of some payment management system (PMS) have encountered technical problems,” HHS said in a statement to PBS News. “The system is now active again, but users can experience delays due to the large number of requests. HHS works through the program support center to speed up the resolution as quickly as possible. ”
Without access to community financing, “directly affects [centers’] ability to serve their patients, staff and communities, “said Amanda Pears Kelly, CEO of Advocates for Community Health, in a statement, adding that the health centers for financing health care are accessible to access and assigned by the Congress and required by the congress and required by the congress and requires the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). “
The CEO of the Minnesota Association of Community Health Centers, Jonathan Watson, said that one of the 16 community centers of the state had not had access to funds until Thursday afternoon. “It doesn’t give us much confidence in our ability to plan the future, much less meet the payroll,” he said.
Ted Varipatis, a spokesperson for the Penobscot Community Health Center in Maine, which had temporarily lost access to funds, said: “This has illustrated the vulnerability of the ground on which PCHC is running.”
Officials of the Community Health Center are all this week in Washington, DC and spent time on Capitol Hill Lobbying -members of the congress about these and other issues on Thursday.
In Virginia, 11 of the 31 member health centers of the Commonwealth were experienced disruptions in depositing their financing this week, according to spokesman Joe Stevens, spokesperson for Virginia Community Healthcare Association. The Richmond Center had to completely close three of the doors of its locations and refer patients to other locations, because those clinics use the federal financing for salaries of employees and they had no reserves. Virginia Public Media reported for the first time on Tuesday about the disruption of payments and services.
Stevens said that VCA undertaken his members when the disruptions started about how long they could operate without those funds. The answers varied between 100 days to six and eight months, depending on how much of the budget of the center comes from the subsidy money.
He said this was the first time that a center in the state should have temporarily closing its doors due to inaccessible funds.
