Wood on PCAP: ‘Their bill is dead until they can find a funding source’
Rep. Fred Wood, R-Burley, chairman of the House Health & Welfare Committee and the sponsor of legislation that failed in the House State Affairs Committee this morning to identify a dedicated funding source for the governor’s proposed PCAP program, said he has no next step. “I told the governor’s office and I told Dick Armstrong that their bill is dead until they can find a funding source,” Wood said, shortly before taking his seat in the House chamber this morning, which is holding its annual memorial service for former lawmakers who died in the past year.
Wood’s bill wouldn’t have tapped the state general fund. Instead, it sought to tap 20 percent of the additional money Idaho receives each year under a nationwide tobacco settlement for five years starting July 1, 2016, money that goes to Idaho’s Millennium Fund, a trust fund whose earnings are used each year to pay for health-related programs; and also redirect 80 percent of the trust fund’s payouts each year to PCAP. Wood’s bill wouldn’t have touched the “corpus” of the trust fund; just part of the additional payments received and earnings payouts.
He estimated the bill would raise $5 million in fiscal year 2017 for the Primary Care Access Program, $15.6 million in fiscal year 2018, $16.4 million in fiscal year 2019; $17.2 million in fiscal year 2020; $18 million in fiscal year 2021 and $18.9 million in fiscal year 2022.
Otter’s proposal is to spend $30 million a year to pay for some limited primary and preventive care for the 78,000 Idahoans who now fall into a health coverage gap, because they make too little to qualify for subsidized insurance plans through the state’s health insurance exchange, and Idaho hasn’t expanded Medicaid to cover non-disabled adults.
Wood acknowledged that the bill wouldn’t cover the full cost of PCAP. He said the one-time savings from Idaho’s Catastrophic Health Care program, which is spending less now that the insurance exchange is in place, would make up the difference for fiscal years ’17 and ’18, and part of the difference for fiscal year 2019. “Which would of course leave about $10 million needed funded for ‘19 and then about $13 or $14 million for the following three years,” he told the committee.
Opponents had questions about the remaining funding, and also questioned whether the Millennium Fund was an appropriate source. Rep. Brent Crane, R-Nampa, asked whether that fund was supposed to go just to tobacco cessation; Wood said no. Currently, grants from the fund’s earnings go for a variety of health-related programs, from tobacco cessation to the Idaho Meth Project to the Idaho Suicide Hotline to substance abuse treatment programs.
The 1998 nationwide tobacco settlement led Idaho to create an endowment fund for the proceeds in 2000; in 2006, Idaho voters amended the state Constitution to create the permanent Idaho Millennium Endowment Fund. That ensured a funding source from the settlement into the future, thanks to earnings; many other states spent their settlement funds right away, and some even borrowed against them years out into the future.
Wood told the committee that Idaho “developed a more conservative approach than some states have, and we have not lost our funding.”
Otter’s proposal called for PCAP to be funded from existing tobacco and cigarette taxes in Idaho, shifting some of the items now funded from those taxes onto the state general fund; others currently funded from those taxes are expiring in the next couple of years. That proposal, however, hasn’t yet been introduced as legislation.
