The regular 2019 legislative session ended this last Monday, May 20th with the legislature failing to pass a complete budget. Only one of the 10 major budget areas, Higher Education, was passed before the constitutionally mandated adjournment time of midnight, leaving the rest to be passed during a special session.
This last week, chairs from the finance committees for the House and Senate worked alongside leadership from the House, Senate and Governor’s office to come up with final budget bills that will be introduced during the special session, which has been formally called for today, Friday, May 24th, beginning at 10:00 am and ending by Saturday, May 25th at 7:00 am.
The final Health and Human Services bill spreadsheet was just released this morning and we are excited to share that many of ARRM’s legislative priorities appear to be included in the final bill. We are still waiting for the bill language to be released which will allow us to do a complete analysis, however here are some quick highlights:
First, a Competitive Workforce Factor for the Disability Waiver Rate System is included in the final bill. Again, without the bill language we are unable to determine the specifics of the proposal but the funding level appears to be close to the original House position which funded the CWF at 4.7%. We will provide more details as soon as we can.
Also, without the bill language we are unable to track which of our policy initiatives made it into the final agreement. We will provide that information at a later time.
We are also happy to share that items that ARRM actively advocated against are not included in the final bill. Those items include:
- NO Adult Foster Care Bed Closure language
- NO Licensing Fee increases
- NO caps on the DD and CADI waiver
While this is all good news, there are some items that ARRM advocated for that did not make the final omnibus bill. The most disappointing of those being our proposal to allow all ICFs to request a variable rate and increase the reimbursement rate for Services During the Day. While we understand that the chairs of the committees had difficult funding decisions to make, we are disappointed that this common sense reform was not included. ARRM will continue to work with stakeholders and the legislature and will be bringing this proposal forward again in 2020.
Things are still very fluid at the Capitol as legislators work to wrap up the 2019 Special Session. We will be providing a more thorough analysis of the Health and Human Service Omnibus bill following session with in-depth one-pagers on some of the more pertinent policy and fiscal changes that were adopted.
If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me at sgrafstrom@arrm.org.
Thanks for all of your advocacy this session!
-- Sara Grafstrom, Director of State and Federal Policy