While the legislature continues to debate hundreds of policy bills, budget writers are also focusing on crafting a supplemental budget for 2016-2017. The legislature enacted a biennial budget for 2015-2017, but this supplemental budget is meant to address emerging needs, such as last summer’s wildfires and the rising costs of prescription drugs.
Recognizing that this is a short session and a supplemental budget, mental health remains our top priority. Other key issues we are advocating for include enhanced payment to hospitals with high volumes of Department of Corrections inmates, and protecting rural nursing homes from the negative effects of changes to the nursing home rate formula.
We need you to contact your Senators and ask them to make funding for mental health a priority in their 2016 supplemental budget. Click here to be directed to the contact information for your hospital/health system’s Senators. Senators on the Senate Ways and Means Committee are particularly important to the decisions about the budget.
Click here to read more in the latest edition of Inside Olympia. (Cassie Sauer)
