Hello everyone,

I will call this another quick update from Topeka, because my goal is just to give you information on our progress, but again, things are by no means over yet.

As of last Friday, the House was struggling to pass their Budget Bill and we were still working on the Veto of SB 55-The Anti-Consumer Protection Act Bill.

On Saturday morning the House did reconsider and their Budget bill passed, which meant that the Conference Committee on the House and Senate Budget bills could begin to meet and work on coming together in the Omnibus Budget bill for the session.  So, both houses passed their budgets (with no amendments to the items we were watching)…

The Appropriations and Ways and Means Conference Committee met again today and began to work the Omnibus Budget Bill.  As of right now here is where we stand with the items we were closely watching in the SRS Budget:
      HCBS/DD   $4M
;     HCBS/PD   $2M (the other 2M is still up for an offer in conference)
Reimbursement Rates      I believe we will end up somewhere around a 2% increase for rates.  (In the bill they have included 2.25M for Reimbursement rates for six programs which include PD, TBI, TA in addition to Addiction and Prevention, DD Grants, and ICF/MR) 
         Base Funding for CILs   $450,000 (which we had already secured $200,000 during the first round of budget negotiations) so, total Base Funding $650,000

The Reimbursement Rates and Base Funding has both been agreed too at this point by both sides of the conference committees, House and Senate, so I anticipate that these will stay the same.  It appears that the Senate is now holding on the additional funding for the PD waiver, and we will know more on this later tomorrow (Monday). 

There was also an attempt within the omnibus Budget bill to remove the cap from the MFP proviso, but this appears to be off the table.  So, for the next year we will just work to put the new policy on MFP into effect and reach the 80 cap, and continue our efforts for next year on removing the cap. 

We had made some plans for a few people to come to Topeka early this week to touch base with their key legislators, but at this point we are not going to move forward with these plans…we believe the Budget Conference Committee report should go to the floor early in the week, and this will likely be done fairly soon (at least that’s what I think right at the moment, ya know things could always change)…so for now we have done what we can to advocate for our programs, and believe all in all we have some good ‘wins’ for this session…and plenty of work to continue to do to make changes in the future J

As far as an update on the Veto of SB 55-The Anti consumer protection Act Bill…new language was worked out and put into another piece of legislation, S Sub for Sub for HB 2541 late on Friday…Although this language does get us further ahead than the language included in SB 55…it still was a bit of a disappointment.  This bill could likely invite more attacks on the Kansas Consumer Protection Act.  This new language does exempt Health Care Providers, as defined in KSA 65-4915, but, interestingly enough does NOT include Nursing Homes as Health Care Providers, so for the moment, Nursing Homes are not exempted from the Kansas consumer protection act. 

I will put together another update later this week, when things are more ‘final’ but for those of you who are wondering what’s happening at the moment…here you go…

Jennifer Schwartz
Executive Director
Ks Association of Centers for Independent Living
214 SW 6th Street
Topeka, KS  66603
785-215-8048