La Porte County mulling whether or not to keep Health First Indiana after state cutbacks

“Next year we will only be receiving $655,000 from the state,” she said at the La Porte County Board of Commissioners meeting on June 4.

On top of losing roughly $2 million in Health First Indiana funding, Lahners said the state implemented other changes, such as House Bill 1427 that only allows counties participating in the program the ability to provide service to Indiana residents.

“Secondary homeowners, especially in the Long Beach [area] and the beach communities, that truthfully pay a lot of tax money, a lot of ... property tax[es], we cannot service,” Lahners said.

“Even if they came to us paying cash for a flu shot, we cannot service them, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” she added.

And even though a large amount of funding will be taken away, and the remaining funds will have to go toward the Health Department’s community partners, she said the requirements the state expects the county to follow and/or fulfill to receive the funding in the first place has not changed.

Board president Connie Gramarossa said the county will have to “do everything that we were doing in the past, but we’re not funded for it, so then it would be the county picking up the cost of that.”

Additionally, the new legislation, Lahners said, prevents the Health Department from using any of the Health First Indiana funding for educational purposes, such as participating in “anything with tobacco prevention and cessation, including vaping.”

Lahners said another rule the county must obey while participating in the Health First Indiana program is that any job opening within the department must “be advertised for 30 days before we can interview and hire, and . . . that person needs to give notice after those 30 days after you’ve interviewed.”

This rule, she said, not only prevents the Health Department from filling open positions for months, but is also only followed by the Health Department, as it doesn’t apply to any other state or county department.

“That has been a large inconvenience in the past and that does make me worry looking forward into the next year,” Lahners said.

“I’m looking at a minimum of four people retiring next year and we’re already short [staffed],” she added.

On the other hand, working with and supplying the funding to the department’s community partners, she said, allows the county to “work on, like, suicide preventions . . . lowering the cancer rate, lowering the number of people who go to the emergency room . . . opposed to going to urgent care.”

“There’s a whole list of things that we just don’t do and don’t have the capacity to do that. We would have to work with community partners to do and that would be having to help them expand their programs to do that.”

With the program requiring the county to decide whether they want to continue participating every two years, Lahners said by the end of this year La Porte County must decide whether they want to continue.

While she’s talked to each of the county’s Health Board members individually, including the county’s Health Officer and the board’s attorney, she said the option hasn’t been officially discussed at a Health Board meeting yet, as the next meeting is in July.

In the meantime, County Attorney Guy DiMartino asked Lahners to prepare two budgets to present to the County Council during their budget hearings in July: one budget if the county chooses to stay in the Health First Indiana program and the other if they decide to opt out of the program.