Providers at community health centers throughout Illinois on Tuesday lost immediate access to millions of dollars in federal grant funding and feared other public dollars were at stake.
Leaders say they risk having to cut back on services within days or months after the Republican Trump administration in a memo issued Monday said it would temporarily pause federal financial assistance.
By 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 freeze announcement was “chaos, confusion and fear,” said Alyssa Sianghio, the CEO of PCC Community Wellness Center, which has clinics on the West Side and in surrounding suburbs.
She said there were two financial buckets on hold. One is federal grant dollars Sianghio receives directly from the federal government. For PCC this comes to about $8 million a year out of a roughly $50 million annual budget.
“Sometimes up to a quarter of our monthly budget comes from grant funds specifically,” Sianghio said. “As we think about all that we’re doing caring for 50,000 people, if a quarter of our funding is just immediately cut off it makes you wonder how long we can sustain it.”
The other piece was whether the state could access Medicaid money to reimburse providers like PCC. About 60% of PCC’s patients have Medicaid, which is public health insurance jointly paid for by the state and federal government. More than 3 million people in Illinois — roughly one of every four people in the state — have Medicaid insurance, according to the nonprofit KFF, a health policy research organization.
Illinois public officials, health care leaders and providers on Tuesday were in a dizzying amount of meetings trying to understand what just happened — if it was even legal — and how long they all could stay afloat without money they rely on.
“What the president is trying to do is illegal,” Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said during a Tuesday afternoon news conference.
A White House spokeswoman said the administration was aware of issues with an online Medicaid payment portal, which state officials had said Tuesday they could not access. But, she said no Medicaid payments were affected.
By the late afternoon, Sianghio said the portal had re-opened, capping off a confusing and exhausting day.
Pritzker said the administration wasn’t telling the truth about there being a “glitch” that resulted in payment systems being shut down Tuesday morning, cutting agencies off from Medicaid and other payment services. He said he believed the action was intentional and was only reinstated when objections were raised.
Community health centers are part of the fabric of low-income and immigrant neighborhoods. They are nonprofits that operate on thin margins, depending largely on grant dollars and government funding to exist. PCC treats around 50,000 people a year, mostly low-income people of color, Sianghio said.
The temporary pause of federal financial aid wasn’t supposed to happen until 5 PM on Tuesday, according to a White House memo. But when PCC went to draw down money earlier in the day through an online portal, as they do near the end of each month to get paid back for eligible grant dollars they already spent, they could not access it.
Sianghio’s team took screen shots, which she said indicated there was some kind of technical glitch preventing access earlier. Pritzker said it wasn’t a glitch, but was intentional.
“Our ability to access critical federal funding had been cut off,” Pritzker said. “They’re either lying to us or they’re critically incompetent.”
Sianghio said she’s worked in community health centers for about a dozen years and hasn’t experienced this amount of confusion in such a short amount of time.