Officials from the Department of Health found themselves in front of the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday to answer about the months-long backlog for the state’s food stamp program, which has hit rural Alaskans particularly hard with stories of elders being hospitalized for malnutrition. As lawmakers get to work on the budget, they specifically sought to understand the problem and whether the funding requests made by Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration would truly be sufficient to fix the problem.
“I know it’s not fun to come to the Finance Committee and talk about problems, but I find it’s a lot better to air the laundry out on the line, have the whole neighborhood look at it and we just fix it, rather than pretend it doesn’t exist,” said Senate Finance Committee co-Chair Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, at the end of the meeting. “We do recognize the size of the department and its complexity and trying to keep the growth of the department reasonable, so it doesn’t have runaway costs, but that doesn’t mean we’re gonna sit back and watch the department implode on itself.”
Department of Health Commissioner-designee Heidi Hedberg told the committee that the backlog was largely a product of the pandemic and the 2021 cyber attack drawing attention away from still-in-progress technology changes in how the state handles its public assistance programs. On that front, she talked about how the state is attempting to hire additional eligibility technicians (it has more than 50 vacancies currently) and contract out to fill gaps, and is finding ways to automate some elements of the enrollment process and has redirected some money to food banks.
“I can’t change the past,” Hedberg told the committee, “but I can own what happens now, going into the future.”
Add on top of the backlog of food stamp applications, which Hedberg acknowledged are some of the most difficult and complex forms that require as much of an hour of staff time to process, the state will also soon be under the gun to process Medicaid eligibility re-determination applications. That’s a product of the federal government unwinding the covid-19 pandemic legislation that increased the benefits for all enrollees. The state now has to get all 260,000 beneficiaries—about a third of the state’s entire population—through the re-determination process by June 2024.
Questions from senators seemed to range from simmering anger over the situation and being left in the dark to “blink twice if you’re OK” as they asked whether the Division of Public Assistance really had the resources it needed to appropriately and quickly address the backlog while also meeting the incoming wave of work once Medicaid re-determinations begin in April.
“We can’t fund repairs if we don’t know there’s something wrong,” Stedman said. “That’s the concern. Can you help me understand why the agency can’t get us information about the problems that are coming at them? … Can you ensure the committee here that we’re not going to need additional funding or assistance to deal with the repercussions of concentration on this one solution jeopardizing other areas? We want to look at it holistically. We’re not, frankly, that concerned about what it costs. … We’re not afraid of problems.”
Hedberg conceded that they’re still trying to understand the scope of the problems facing the state’s public assistance programs, but that upgrades to the technology will go a long way to addressing it. She said she can’t be sure there won’t be new problems, but said the funding “definitely addresses most of the issues.”
Senators on the committee weren’t particularly convinced.
They frequently pointed out that the positives touted by the administration don’t come close to really fixing the situation. The $1.6 million the state diverted from its food security program to food banks this week is less than 10% of what the food stamps program would send out in a month. While officials praised changes that will handle some cases automatically, legislators pointed out that eligibility technicians are still having more and more added to their plates. Even with efforts to hire and train new technicians, the state eventually conceded that it doesn’t even have the capacity to train and deploy workers into the state’s 54 vacancies. They currently have just three openings posted online.
And even with those jobs, the full course of training for an eligibility technician is about two years. Two years! And the training just for the food stamp program is roughly two months. The pay isn’t particularly competitive considering the amount of training at a range of $22 to $24 an hour.
Sen. David Wilson, R-Wasilla, said he was frustrated to see in all the presentations about new technology and private contracts no mention of efforts to rethink and rework the hiring and training process. He said regardless of the fixes they make, they’ll find themselves in the same spot again if it really takes as much as two years to get someone fully online when the pay isn’t even particularly competitive.
“If it takes at least two months or two years to get me fully trained, and I just need a high school diploma to make $24 at max, I could do a lot less work and get paid the same wages somewhere else,” he said. “It seems like you’ll have the same systemic problem occur later on in the future if you have a large staffing turnover at any point in time. This problem will just pop up again.”
Again, state officials said it’s something that they’re in the process of looking at.
The hearing largely left things at a wary spot. Officials with the Department of Health pledged to work better with the Legislature moving forward, like making some additional documents available to the Legislative Finance Division in a few weeks. Stedman ultimately said he would rather the whole thing be voluntary, rather than add “encouragement into your budget.”
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
