The providers of the Illinois community health centers lost immediate access to millions of federal subsidies on Tuesday and feared that other public dollars were at stake.
Managers say they may have to reduce services in the days or months after Trump’s republican administration in A memo published Monday said he would temporarily put federal financial assistance.
At the end of Tuesday, a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s order, according to the Associated Press.
But the immediate impact in Illinois of the Gel’s announcement was “Chaos, confusion and fear,” said Alyssa Sianghio, CEO of the CCC Community Wellness Center, which has clinics on the west side and in the suburbs surrounding.
She said there were two pending financial buckets. One is the federal dollar subsidy that Sianghio receives directly from the federal government. For PCC, this amounts to approximately $ 8 million per year over an annual budget of approximately $ 50 million.
“Sometimes, up to a quarter of our monthly budget comes specifically from grant funds,” said Sianghio. “While we think of everything we take care of 50,000 people, if a quarter of our funding is immediately cut, you wonder how long we can support it.”
The other part was whether the condition could access Medicaid Money to reimburse suppliers like PCC. About 60% of PCC patients have Medicaid, which is public health insurance paid jointly by the State and the federal government. More than 3 million people in Illinois – roughly One in four people In the State – having Medicaid insurance, according to the non -profit KFF, a research organization on health policies.
Civil servants, health leaders and Illinois health providers on Tuesday were in a dizzying quantity of meetings trying to understand what just happened – if it was even legal – and how long they could all stay Flood without money on which they count.
“What the president tries to do is illegal,” said Illinois Democratic Governor JB Pritzker at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon.
A White House spokeswoman said the administration was aware of the problems with an online Medicaid payment portal, to which state officials said on Tuesday that they could not access. But, she said that no Medicaid payment was affected.
At the end of the afternoon, Sianghio said that the portal had reopened, capping a confusing and exhausting day.
Pritzker said that the administration did not tell the truth about the fact that there was a “problem” that led to the closure of payment systems on Tuesday morning, reducing Medicaid agencies and other payment services. He said he believed that action was intentional and was only reintegrated when objections had been raised.
Community health centers are part of the fabric of low -income and immigrant neighborhoods. These are non -profit organizations that operate on the sidelines, according to dollars of subsidies and government financing. The PCC has been about 50,000 people a year, mainly low -color people, said Sianghio.
The temporary break of federal financial aid was not supposed to occur before 5 p.m. on Tuesday, according to a White House memo. But when PCC went to withdraw money earlier during the day via an online portal, as they do towards the end of each month to be reimbursed for dollars of eligible subsidies that they have already spent, they do not could not access it.
The Sianghio team has taken screenshots, which, she said, said that there was a kind of technical problem preventing access earlier. Pritzker said it was not a problem, but was intentional.
“Our ability to access critical federal funding has been cut,” said Pritzker. “They lie to us or are incompetent in a critical way.”
Sianghio said that she has been working in community health centers for a dozen years and has not experienced this amount of confusion in such a short time.
Kristen Schorsch covers public health and Cook County for Wbez.