The Senate released its proposed 2024 budget Sunday evening, Feb. 18, and the House released its proposed 2024 budget Monday, Feb. 19 at noon. Over the next couple of weeks, the two chambers will work together to craft a final budget. The legislative session adjourns March 7.
In last year’s 2023-2025 biennial budget, we saw unprecedented investments in important areas for hospital and health care, such as the hospital Safety Net Assessment Program and investments to help with complex discharge patients. Given the supplemental session and the previous historic funding, we expected to have a much smaller budget this year. That said, WSHA is disappointed some of our important priorities were not funded in these budgets. These priorities included long-term care slots for complex discharge patients who are undocumented, rural labor and delivery sustainability, and Medicaid coverage of partial hospitalization/intensive outpatient treatment programs for adults.
We are pleased that both budgets funded the Washington Reproductive Access Alliance for public hospital districts and a new residential treatment facility for children/youth with developmental disabilities and complex behaviors, and the House provides some funding for distressed hospital grants.
For more information and link to a side-by-side comparison of the proposed House and Senate budgets, see our recent Inside Olympia. (Andrew Busz, andrewb@wsha.org)
