Crime victims fund running low
A Washington state program that pays the hospital bills of uninsured crime victims is running out of money.
The Crime Victims Compensation Program may shut down early next year if a supplemental budget appropriation isn’t approved by the Legislature, according to the state agency that runs it.
It’s more bad news for Spokane hospitals, which already are struggling financially. Since Sept. 1, the crime victims program reduced the rates it pays to hospitals by 30 to 50 percent as it tries to make its remaining money last longer.
And it’s bad news for crime victims without health insurance.
“Right now, running out of money would mean there’s no coverage for sexual assault examinations in the emergency room, no wage compensation for victims of crime for missed work and no grief counseling,” said Corey Shank, director of operations for PMSI, a company that helps the region’s hospitals connect uninsured patients with funding sources such as Medicaid and the crime victims program.
The crime victims program helps 7,000 Washington state crime victims annually. In addition, it pays for 4,000 sexual assault exams each year.
In Spokane, Deaconess Medical Center received about $163,000 in fiscal year 2004 for 199 crime victim patients. Valley Hospital and Medical Center estimates it received about $30,000 that year for 46 patients.
“Any loss of funding has its impact. It all adds up,” said Janice Marich, spokeswoman for Empire Health Services. “It’s all part of a trend that shifts responsibility of the care for the uninsured onto hospitals.”
Why the program is running out of money has to do with the loss of another state funding source for hospitals.
Hospitals began billing the crime victims program more frequently in July 2003 after the Legislature cut $86 million from the current biennial budget for the so-called “medically indigent” program. That money had helped hospitals pay for treatment for low-income uninsured people.
Hospitals had billed the medically indigent program first because the crime victims fund was meant as a last resort, Shank said.
With the loss of the medically indigent program money, the crime victims program’s spending on inpatient hospital care rose more than 200 percent. For the 2004 fiscal year, the program so far has spent $1.85 million on inpatient care, with many bills still unsubmitted.
The Department of Labor and Industries plans to ask the Legislature for an additional $6.5 million, said department spokesman Robert Nelson. That amount would get the program through the fiscal year and reimburse health care providers at the rate paid before Sept. 1.
Without help from state lawmakers, the Labor and Industries program could run out of money as early as mid-March.
About 28 percent of the program’s annual $15 million budget comes from the federal Justice Department’s Office of the Victims of Crime. The rest comes from Washington state’s Public Safety Education Account, which is collected from long-distance telephone fees paid by prison inmates and from traffic fines.