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Maricopa Woman Urges State to Keep Fresno Medical Office Open
Topics: health care
Posted by TaftIndependent Mon Jul 9, 2007 12:40:12 PDT
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Helen Wells is urging the Department of Health Services not to shut down the Fresno Regional Medi-Cal office, which she relies on for the care of her son, Harold Wells Jr. Harold was paralyzed from the neck down during an accident at a tough truck competition in March of 2006.

Harold Wells Jr.’s employer-provided health insurance expired several months later and since that time he’s been relying on Medi-Cal and the Fresno office for treatment. The Fresno office provides a very personal level of service for its recipients, says Helen Wells, and has helped her son immensely. “I fear it won’t be that one to one service with patients anymore,” said Helen Wells.

The Fresno Medi-Cal office received notice from the state Department of Health Services in November of 2006 that it would no longer be operating as of November 2007 due to budget cutbacks.

“It’s really too bad,” said Kathleen Phillips, a nurse at with the Fresno center, “we’re an up-to-date facility with a great bunch of nurses.”

Phillips has been making trips down to Maricopa once every several months to assist with Wells’ care. She says shutting down the Fresno office will put even more stress on the bigger offices, further delaying the Medi-Cal payments to these offices.

“It’s a vicious cycle,” said Phillips. “When providers receive a delay in payment it ties up their cash flow and then they can’t afford to do business. When smaller offices shut down, it just creates more delays and bigger burdens for the larger hospitals.”

Local legislators agree. On June 18 State Senator Dean Florez and Assemblywomen Jean Fuller and Nicole Parra sent a letter to the governor requesting his support of the effort to keep the office open. The letter cited declining quality of health care and economic concerns, saying “…no state savings would actually result from vacating this space. In fact, the state could save money by keeping Medi-Cal operations in Fresno.”

The budget subcommittees in the assembly and senate have included the facility in the budget for 2007/2008, but supporters are concerned that the difficulty in keeping the office open will come from the governor’s office, which has made getting the state out of debt one of its priorities since Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger took office in 2004.

According to a representative from Service Employees International Union 1000, “We’ve been told they’ve already written the veto language on this.”

The June 18 letter addressed that concern as well, saying, “We strongly urge you to preserve the 2007-08 budget bill language preventing the office’s closure.”

Wells says if the Fresno office closes she’ll be forced to go through the office in Los Angeles, which is frequently overcrowded.

“I submitted a treatment authorization request to them and it took them two months just to tell me they never received it,” said Wells.

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