San Juan County Public Hospital Board held a special meeting Friday, April 1 to discuss what board member Monica Harrington called an “on-going fiscal crisis”: the San Juan Island Emergency Medical Services budgeting process and the current EMS levy, set to expire December 31, 2016.
EMS cannot get a new levy on the August ballot unless their proposed 2017 budget is balanced by May 13, 2016, the last day to file a resolution for the August Primary.
Currently the 2017 EMS budget is upside down by about $640,000. Some of this is variable and has to do with how Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance and patients are billed and how those bills are then collected upon. In 2015, for example, EMS billed approximately 1.5 million dollars (for more than a 15 month period), yet only $364,000 of that has actually been collected. Because San Juan County residents are not charged for transportation costs provided to them by EMS-including ground and air transport-what insurance companies are willing to pay are the only amounts able to be collected. For example, Medicare and Medicaid only pay a couple of hundred dollars per transport even though the actual amount billed by EMS averages $1,500. The amount left over is deemed “uncollectable”.
Another factor: declining property values due to the real estate bust in 2008, which is how the levy is funded (.35 cents per 1,000 dollars of assessed home value), have led to almost $500,000 in lost funding, according to the San Juan EMS website.
Chief Jerry Martin was on hand to explain the importance of EMS’ many services including national recognition for excellence in rural advanced life support care and transportation.
“Our goal is to keep the quality of service and response times we have today,” said Martin. “The .50 per 1,000 levy is necessary to meet these goals.”
The board laid out potential options on how to address the problem of balancing the budget before unanimously deciding to give Martin and his team until mid-April to come up with a balanced, workable 2017 budget.
In the meantime the board will seek out a minimum of two consultants who could potentially step in and help set the budget before the May deadline.
“We have had resplendent EMS services up to this point,” said board member Michael Edwards. “We don’t want to step back from that. But at the same time, is it continuable?” San Juan Island EMS is a service of the San Juan County Public Hospital District No. 1, and provides Emergency Medical Services and medical transportation for residents of, and visitors to, San Juan Island, the Town of Friday Harbor, and residents of Brown, Pearl, Henry, Speiden, John and Stuart islands, according to their website.
