The Senate passed a $17.6B state budget after midnight last Thursday which includes some of Hobbs’ priorities and some priorities on both Senate Dems and Republicans.
The House then threw a temper tantrum protesting their lack of involvement with the negotiations (even they themselves decided not to take part.
After passing a budget on Thursday am that was sure to be vetoed (and it was), the House then made a few tweaks to the previously passed Senate budget late Thursday night. That amended bill passed and was sent back to the Senate this morning. Because it’s been tweaked from the version – the Senate still needs to vote on it one last time before it gets sent to the governor.
Here’s a link to the main (amended) appropriations bill and the health budget reconciliation bill that the Senate will not take up one last time before sending the package to the Governor.
The Senate had originally included speech therapy and cochlear implants as a covered service for adults but that was stripped by the House last night. Funds for traditional healing practices for tribal members survived the House amendments.
The House and Senate eventually agreed on the following increases in one-time funding:
- $45M for childcare aid
- $5M for ibogaine clinical research grants
- $5M for capital expenses for secure residential behavioral health facilities
- $4M for graduate medical education
- $2M for the Produce Incentive Program
- $1.5M for nursing education at community colleges
- $750K for a dementia awareness campaign
- $500K for AEDs for public high school athletics
- $160K for isolation valves, $695K for anti-ligature renovations, $83K for perimeter detection systems, $3.3M for this year’s funding shortfall for Arizona State Hospital operations.
There was good news about the development of secure residential behavioral health facilities. After several years of constant work, AHCCCS was finally appropriated $5M for secure behavioral health residential facilities. One warning is that someone added passive aggressive session law to the feed bill and some of that language looks like it’s designed to tee up excuses for AHCCCS not to issue the RFP for the facilities, but we’ll see.
The Senate budget also requires AHCCCS to offer one-year AHCCCS complete care contract extensions to all managed care entities and RBHAs through September 30, 2028.