WOODSTOCK Local health officials warn a decision by the McHenry County Board to reject a state grant to pay for counselors to help insure people under the Affordable Care Act will hurt county residents in need.

While the County Board voted last year to accept the Illinois Department of Public Health grant, it voted Tuesday against doing so again, and turned down $584,791 to pay for a counselor and several social service agencies to help enroll people through the state health care exchange. The 10-10 vote on which the proposal died was far below the 16 votes needed to pass because part of the grant would fall under the present county fiscal year ending Nov. 30.

Tuesdays vote means the Department of Health will have to return the funding, which will be allocated elsewhere in Illinois, county Public Health Administrator Michael Hill said. While Hill expressed disappointment in the boards decision, others expressed shock and anger.

The decision stunned Suzanne Hoban, executive director of Family Health Partnership Clinic, which since 1996 has worked to provide health care access to those who could not otherwise afford it. The agency, now located in Crystal Lake, serves about 3,000 people a year and is one of the agencies for which counselor funding would be disbursed under the rejected grant.

For us and for the people we serve, this is a huge blow. Our clinic takes care of people with no access to health care at all. Our goal is to see how many people we can get out of our clinic and into private practice [through acquiring insurance], because our resources are stretched to the limit, Hoban said.

Most of the grant funding, which requires no local match, would go to the local agencies to allow them to hire staff to aid in enrollment, and would pay for about five full-time-equivalent employees at the health department until the grant period expires April 15.

The County Board vote came after a brief discussion during which Diane Evertsen, R-Harvard, and Ersel Schuster, R-Woodstock, spoke against taking the grant money, and Nick Chirikos, D-Algonquin, spoke in favor.

This funding for the Affordable Care the Non-Affordable Care Act is another half a million dollars plus to try and make something work that is an admitted failure, Evertsen said.

Finance and Audit Committee Chairwoman Mary McCann, R-Woodstock, called Tuesdays vote a protest against Obamacare that will only hurt the uninsured. She said she has referenced numerous seniors, who are not Internet-savvy on top of the complicated enrollment process, to seek the help the grant funded.

This is crazy. Were penalizing the public were supposed to be serving, McCann said.

Read the original here:

McHenry County Board rejection of health care grant sparks concern, anger