HCMC fights back against Pawlenty’s GAMC cuts

Minnesota legislators and Hennepin County Medical Center officials said cuts to the hospital budget could have a dangerous “ripple effect” across Minnesota, with more cuts anticipated under the state’s projected $1.2 billion budget shortfall.
Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto of General Assistance Medical Care, which covered hospital costs for Minnesotans making under $8,000 annually, will make up $43 million of the hospital’s predicted losses for 2010 and $50 million in 2011.
The impact that losing GAMC on March 1 would have on HCMC and Minnesota was addressed Wednesday at a forum at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, attended by HCMC CEO Art Gonzalez.
This discussion of HCMC cuts was one of many going on across the state and online with the creation of the hospital’s “Will You Lose?” Web site. The site outlines what programs could be affected by cuts and has related Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pages, which were launched Nov. 20.
The Facebook page has about 750 fans, and the Twitter page has 125 followers. The “Will You Lose?” site has had about 2,300 unique visitors.
“We haven’t really done much external publicity in this first week, so it’s people finding us,” said Tom Hayes, an HCMC spokesman who helped create the Web site.
The interest in HCMC and GAMC is of wide concern because it will impact other programs as well, Rep. Jeff Hayden, DFL-Minneapolis, said.
“People are feeling it pretty closely,” Hayden said. With one in four people in the state living in Hennepin County, he said he thought that “everybody cannot help but to be concerned.”
“This isn’t good for Minnesota ... when the county has to start laying off child protection workers, when they have to start laying off essential services in order to pay for the anticipated hole that GAMC has made,” Hayden said.
HCMC is just one of many agencies and programs that are looking at the state and city budgets coming out and saying toconstituents, “hey, here’s what you aren’t going to get,” Hayden said.
But for GAMC, a lot of the cuts will hurt people “who don’t have a lot of power and a lot of voice,” Hayden said.
In 2009, GAMC has had an average of 30,400 people enrolled in the program each month, Karen Smigielski, spokeswoman at the Department of Human Services, said.
Many GAMC recipients are families in crisis, seniors dependent on the service and people with chronic mental health issues who don’t have the loud advocacy “to scream and holler,” Hayden said. “But they’re starting to get there.”
The site encourages people to contact legislators, who will discuss the issue in February and “demand alternate funding.”
On Nov. 18, 200 protesters lined up in front of HCMC forming a “never-ending emergency room line” to show what would happen if GAMC is lost, said AFSCME Council 5 Public Affairs Director Jennifer Munt.
“If 35,000 more people become uninsured, there is a ripple effect,” Hayes said.
On top of GAMC losses, HCMC suffered $12 million in unallotment cuts in 2008.
Rep. Bruce Anderson, R-Buffalo Township, said the need for unallotments and cuts came from the inability of the Democratic majority in the house to bring forward a budget Pawlenty could sign. “This wouldn’t have happened if they had taken some leadership and passed a balanced budget,” he said.
Pawlenty announced that people previously enrolled in GAMC would be autoenrolled in MinnesotaCare, but Hayes said this is only a “one-time fix.” Munt said the proposal is a “formula for bankruptcy.”
Health care is the main cost driver for counties, cities and the state, Pawlenty said Wednesday at a press conference for the economic forecast. Publicly subsidized health care programs in particular are “in dire need of reform,” Pawlenty said. “The GAMC issue is just one step, or one piece, of a much larger picture,” he said.