Many left behind as Wyoming continues its opposition to Medicaid expansion

Wyoming is one of those Obamacare-hatin' states that have (thus far) refused Medicaid expansion.

This snippet by Virally Suppressed on Daily Kos seemed to be relevant to the issue:

With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid expansion and mental health parity law all taking place at the present, it is difficult to anticipate where we will end up in ten years time. It is a fairly safe bet that Federal spending on mental health will continue to rise at a lightning pace due to the nature of the Medicaid expansion, which places a minimum of 90 percent of the costs on the Federal government while extending comprehensive mental health care to tens of millions of low income Americans. It is also more than likely that the health gap in this country will become exacerbated by this new legislation, an idea which seems counterintuitive considering the entire point of the Affordable Care Act is to reduce barriers to health care and create a more egalitarian health system. However, thanks to the infinite wisdom of The Supreme Court, state governments have been given an irresponsible amount of power in their legal right to refuse Medicaid expansion and essentially tell their constituencies that they will have to forgo medical care because of an ideological tiff between two political parties who don't have their best interest in mind. This latitude which has been given to state governments and which is arguably in violation of the supremacy clause of the Constitution, will create a two-tiered mental health system in which the healthy get healthier and sick continue to be ignored by the system that is supposed to be protecting them. Thus far, 24 states (and DC) have said that they will be participating in Medicaid expansion, while 14 states have stated that they will not be taking part. Of those 14 states, only 3 are in the top half of the nation's health rankings and 5 rank among the bottom 10. It looks like some states are replacing old state funding with Federal funding, while other states aren't replacing old state funding with anything.

Read the rest here.

Republican Sequester brings pain to Wyoming

Sequester causes cuts in funding for special needs students: http://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/sequester-might-cut-funding-special-needs-students

Mayors from communities around Yellowstone National Park have petitioned Gov. Mead to use state funds to plow the park's roads so it will open on time for tourist season. Yellowstone's budget has been cut by more than $1.5 million due to sequestration. The Governor wonders why the state should have to spend money for federal obligations: http://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/governor-ponders-sequestration-help

Cheyenne Airport may have to shutter its air traffic control tower: http://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/cheyenne-regional-airport-might-lose-air-tower

Wyoming Broadband Summit: New generation of Microsoft data centers to be tested in Cheyenne

Microsoft's Gregg McKnight was in Cheyenne today talking about a pilot project for a new kind of data center. He was a speaker at the first Wyoming Broadband Summit at Little America.

Asked McKnight: “Who would have expected Cheyenne to be the place where the next generation of data centers would arise?”

Not me. Maybe not you, or your neighbors. And possibly not McKnight, not until he visited Cheyenne a few months ago.

He was greeted warmly by officials from the University of Wyoming, Cheyenne LEADS, Board of Public Utilities and other members of the community.

“This was a dream” he said, adding that, over the course of several days, he discovered that Cheyenne “was the ideal location to do business.”

Microsoft wants to build a $7.6 million data center that will run off of methane produced by the city’s Dry Creek Water Reclamation Facility. To that end, the city of Cheyenne will apply for $1.5 million from the Wyoming Business Council's Council’s Business Ready Community Grant and Loan Program. Three weeks ago, the Cheyenne City Council’s Finance Committee gave its approval to move the request forward. If approved, the grant would cover up to $1.5 million of the project’s total cost, with Microsoft providing the balance.

According to officials at the computing giant, the project would consist of the data plant, which would be connected to a fuel cell. Both would be in close proximity to the water reclamation facility, which is located on Campstool Road just south of Interstate 80.

The fuel cell would collect excess methane gas from the water reclamation facility’s biodigester and would then convert the gas into about 300 kilowatts of electricity. The data center itself would require only 200 kilowatts to run. Not sure where the remaining 100 Kw would do. Presumably it could be used for other energy needs in Cheyenne.

The plant will test Microsoft's new “siliconization” process, which utilizes silicon to move beyond the era of the microprocessor. McKnight gave a quick explanation which went way over my head. He showed a slide that illustrated this formula: “Si Systems + Fuel Cells + Modularity=Reimagine the Data Center.” Sounds cool to me. Faster technology is needed for the 200-plus cloud services Microsoft now provides. “There will be a twelve-fold increase in the amount of info that flows through the optic fiber backbone in the next five years,” McKnight said. He called the Cheyenne experiment the next step in “the evolving data center.”

The fuel cell data plant is separate from a $112 million cloud data center Microsoft has proposed to build to the west of Cheyenne, near the recently-opened National Center for Atmospheric Research supercomputing facility.

McKnight is quite happy with Cheyenne. And why wouldn't he be? The state of Wyoming has pledged $10.7 million in grants and incentives for the cloud data center project. Microsoft is making an initial $78-million investment and plans to go up to $112 million, according to Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead, who also spoke at Tuesday's summit. He's a big believer in data centers. And I'm beginning to believe that he's on the right track. All of this will change Cheyenne for the better. New technology. New ideas. New people moving in. New energy mixes with old energy. Not sure what the formula is for that, but it could be a heady mix.

Dear Gov. Matt Mead: Expand Medicaid to cover Wyoming's uninsured

From the Rev. Rodger McDaniel and friends:

A group of us are putting together a letter to Governor Matt Mead to urge him to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. If you would like your name to appear on the letter, please respond and let me know exactly how you'd like it to appear. If you have friends who will sign, please let me know. I will need their e-mail authorization. A copy of the draft letter is attached. The more the better...by the end of this week. The letter will be hand-delivered to the Govenor by former State Rep. Pete Jorgensen.

I've added my name to the letter. You can too. Rodger's e-mail is rodger.mcdaniel@bresnan.net

Read the details in Rodger's Saturday column at http://blowinginthewyomingwind.blogspot.com/2012/07/mead-thinks-insuring-uninsured-is-not.html

Dear Gov. Mead: Make Wyoming a healthier place by embracing Medicaid expansion

When Rodger McDaniel writes about mental health and substance abuse treatment in Wyoming, he knows his subjects. Under Gov. Dave Freudenthal, the Rev. McDaniel was Director of the Mental Health Health and Substance Abuse Division of the Wyoming Health Department. Today in his blog (and on the op-ed pages of the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle), he makes the modest proposal that the Great Conservative State of Wyoming should embrace Medicaid expansion. It's a hard sell because Wyoming and its Governor were parties to the Affordable Care Act lawsuit that recently was spured by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court. Read on:

The enormous investment Wyoming made in mental health and substance abuse treatment in the last decade puts the state in a position to cash in big on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Governor Mead and state legislators should weigh the opportunity before rushing to join other Republican governors rejecting federal funding of Medicaid expansion. 

Today Wyoming taxpayers spend more than 95 million dollars each budget period on mental health and substance abuse services. If Wyoming implements the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, most of that money can be returned to the general fund.

Read the rest here.

Wyoming is not always a trailblazer when it comes to mental health and substance abuse programs. But its Children's Medicaid Waiver has been a godsend to many Wyoming families in crisis. The Medicaid Waiver has helped both uninsured and underinsured families who've sent their children to a treatment program that is usually hours away from home, often out-of-state. When our daughter was diagnosed as bipolar, we had to send her to treatment for four months in Colorado and seven months in Casper. We signed her up for the Medicaid Waiver which kicked in when our insurance company limited her treatment. Before Obamacare, insurance companies either placed caps on mental health treatment or disallowed it as a pre-exisiting condition. The same held true for substance abuse treatment. When our son needed help for substance abuse almost ten years ago, our insurance lapsed after 50 treatment sessions. Since he was in a residential center and had daily sessions, the insurance was up way before the therapy could bear fruit -- nine months before he successfully returned home, clean and sober. We spent my father's inheritance to pay for some of the treatment and our son worked on the center's landscaping crew to pay for the rest. Expensive but worth it.


Many other families share our experience. Others will face problems in the future. The Medicaid Waiver helped pay for our daughter's treatment and for the "wraparound care" that followed her return to the home. A treatment team of parents, siblings, relatives, friends -- led by a certified mental health professional -- guided her back into her community. This beats the old approach of letting our teens sink or swim on their own, which didn't work our too well. Teens with mental illnesses or substance abuse problems have enough problems without having to readjust to school and home and work all by themselves.


Many families never use the Medicaid Waiver or similar programs because they don't know about it. There's a great statewide organization, UPLIFT, that is a resource for these services. I'm on the UPLIFT board and that's how I found out about the waiver. Get more info by calling UPLIFT at 307-778-8686. And be not afraid to go directly to the source at the Wyoming state offices. Yes, I know, it's a big state agency located in a monolithic grey building. But you can talk to real people there -- I did.


This web site is a good place to start: http://www.health.wyo.gov/mhsa/treatment/SystemofCare.html. As you'll see, the waiver program is now focused on keeping the child in the community by providing that wraparound care I talked about earlier.


I do not know how Obamacare, with or without Medicaid expansion, will affect these programs. But in a time of budget cuts in state funds, more Medicaid money from the Feds is a good thing, is it not?


No surprise that health care will be a major topic at this week's National Governors Association conference in Virginia. Also on the agenda is a discussion about the needs of military members returning home from the wars. Gov. Mead co-chairs the NGA committee addressing this issue. Some of the most pressing needs involved mental health care, not only for veterans but their families. The Veteran's Administration Hospital in Cheyenne recently expanded its services by hiring four new psychologists. 

Big turnout at Governor's Offfice for signing of Children's Mental Health Awareness Week proclamation

Top photo: Big turnout Wednesday morning for Governor Matt Mead's signing of the proclamation for Children's Mental Health Awareness Week. A large group of concerned parents and children joined with UPLIFT staffers and board members, representatives from the Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services Division, and Sen. Floyd Esquibel. Everyone received a "Children's Mental Health Matters" ribbon and balloon, even the Governor. Bottom photo: UPLIFT’s Kim Conner asked me, as an UPLIFT board member, to share some national stats on children's mental health with Gov. Matt Mead at Wednesday’s proclamation signing.