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Committee ranks health-care budget priorities, forwards recommendations to appropriations
Summary
A health-care committee compiled and ranked funding requests it plans to send to the appropriations committee, placing increases to FQHC Medicaid rates and home health provider rates at the top and recommending moves to base funding for several pilot programs.
Committee member 1, a member of the Health Care Committee, said the panel had completed a ranked list of budget recommendations to send to the appropriations committee and presented the group’s top priorities.
The committee’s highest-priority, base-funding recommendations include increasing Medicaid reimbursement rates for federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) and raising home-health provider rates. The panel also ranked a Vermont Care Partners request for provider rate increases for designated agencies (DAs) and specialized service agencies (SSAs) and approved moving Bridges to Health into the base budget with an identified base amount for this year of $675,900, according to the committee’s spreadsheet.
The committee tied increases to family-planning billing codes used by Planned Parenthood of New England with funding for the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner program as a shared priority. Other items discussed included a request for a fee-schedule adjustment for inflation (RBRVS), the Medicare Savings Program (MSP), a medical-student incentive scholarship, and several pilot or continuation programs such as SASH (Support and Services at Home) expansions, mental-health integration pilots, and a family medicine residency grant.
Committee members debated whether some line items lacked specific dollar amounts and whether to include those items on the submission to appropriations as language-only requests. A member noted a report and asked whether the report contained numbers to support the fee-schedule adjustment; staff said numbers might be obtained before the submission.
Members agreed to include the full list of requests on the spreadsheet but to mark only the top five base requests and the top one-time request with numbered priority positions. The committee also discussed including a cover letter to appropriations emphasizing the importance of the entire list to Vermont’s continuum of care while highlighting the top priorities.
The panel conducted a straw poll on sending the recommendations to the appropriations committee. Committee member 1 noted that a member unable to attend had informed the clerk she supported the proposal. The chair counted hands and the group recorded the poll as 10 yes, 0 no, 1 other; the member characterized the result as the committee moving forward to send the recommendations. The clerk’s office advised that members who are not present for a straw poll can register their votes later, underscoring that the poll is not an official final appropriation vote.
Next steps recorded by the committee included finalizing the spreadsheet with costs where available, circulating the draft letter for comment, and sending the materials to the appropriations committee later the same day.
