CHCANYS PRESIDENT AND CEO ROSE DUHAN DELIVERED REMARKS TO JOINT LEGISLATIVE BUDGET HEARING
(Albany, N.Y.) – Community Health Care Association of New York State’s President and CEO Rose Duhan delivered the following oral testimony to the Joint Legislative Budget Hearing on Health and Medicaid, Tuesday, February 11. A video of her testimony may be viewed here.
“Good afternoon. I’m Rose Duhan, President & CEO of the Community Health Care Association of New York State. CHCANYS is the statewide association that represents 80-plus community health center member organizations at close to 900 sites statewide, serving 2.4 million New Yorkers each year. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today.
On behalf of our members, I want to thank the legislature for your continued support and commitment to CHCs. We need you now more than ever to fix two and a half decades of underinvestment in Community Health Centers.
We appreciate the small increase to health center funding in the executive budget, but I’m going to be frank: it’s not enough to preserve access to patient care. We need community health center rate reform now, so I’m asking you to add the language included in Assembly Bill 67 and S4589 to your one house budgets.
To get health centers to get where they need to be in the short-term, we also ask you to ensure at least 15-percent of all MCO tax investments are directed to primary care by investing 75-million dollars in Community Health Centers. Without this investment and real rate reform – we cannot guarantee all health centers will survive at a time when more New Yorkers than ever have come to count on them.
Finally, we need you to fix the current law under which community health centers receive one-third of their full Medicaid payment for telehealth care when both the patient and provider are outside the health center walls.
1 in 8 New Yorkers COUNT ON Community Health Centers for high quality, person centered care. They count on us. Can we count on you?”
More information and CHCANYS’ full written testimony can be found online, https://nyassembly.gov/write/upload/publichearing/001446/005812.pdf.
For more information about CHCANYS, visit https://www.facebook.com/CHCANYS/.
