Indian clinics in jeopardy
For the second year in a row, the Bush administration has proposed eliminating the program that helps fund health care for urban Indians living in Spokane and 33 other cities across the nation.
The threatened cut comes amid construction of a new $3.9 million clinic in the West Central Neighborhood, which has the highest concentration of Spokane’s nearly 13,000 urban Indians.
“We are obviously invested in the community,” said Toni Lodge, director of NATIVE Project/NATIVE Health of Spokane. “If the goal is quality health care for every citizen, part of that system is urban Indian health.”
In opposing the administration’s plan to eliminate the Urban Indian Health Program last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers rejected the argument that the program duplicates services offered by other federal, state and local health programs.
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of the Appropriations Committee, said she will again work to restore urban Indian health funding.
“It is frustrating to see that the president’s budget once again attempts to pull the rug out from under Native Americans who rely on health clinics in urban communities,” Murray said. “Cutting funding for clinics, like NATIVE Health of Spokane, which serve at-risk, in-need residents is an example of the president’s bad budget priorities.”
A spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers said the 5th District Republican also had concerns about this and rural health care funding that has been “zeroed out” in Bush’s budget.
“We will work with the Washington delegation to restore that funding,” said Jill Strait, press secretary for McMorris Rodgers. “The health clinic is important to Spokane.”
Fiscal 2007 funding of the Urban Indian Health Program amounts to $33 million, 1 percent of the entire Indian Health Service Budget for 2008. The NATIVE Health clinic receives about $900,000 a year from Indian Health Service, or 40 percent of the clinic’s total budget, according to Lodge.
Largely because of U.S. assimilation policies of the 1950s and ‘60s, about two-thirds of the 4.1 million people who identify themselves as American Indian and Alaska Native live in metropolitan areas.
The Urban Indian Health Program, funded under Title V of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, provides care to an estimated 120,000 urban Indians annually, according to the nonprofit National Council of Urban Indian Health.
The council’s executive director, Geoffrey Roth, said that while the proposed cuts come as no surprise to Indian Country, “the administration’s continued disregard of the urgent health care needs of the urban Indian population and tribes’ rights to self-determination is nevertheless disconcerting.”
Last year, Spokane’s urban Indian health clinic, 505 E. North Foothills Drive, provided care to more than 7,000 people, 70 percent of whom were Native American.
If the Urban Indian Health Program were eliminated, local health officials believe it would be difficult to absorb NATIVE Health’s patients in a county that has an estimated 45,000 uninsured people.
Lodge said it is more likely her clinic’s Indian patients would seek care on the Spokane and Coeur d’Alene reservations. However, the Wellpinit, Wash., and Plummer, Idaho, clinics also have seen reductions in federal funding as a percentage of their total budgets in recent years.
“If we all moved home, it would break the IHS,” Lodge said. “There is no way they could support the 70 percent of the Indian people that don’t live on the reservation.”
Lodge said Bush’s own “Healthy People” initiative calls for improving quality of life and eliminating health care disparities among different segments of the population.
The new clinic being built in the 1800 block of West Maxwell Avenue was the result of the community recognizing the need for increasing health services for minorities and the poor, Lodge said.
She called the administration’s budget proposal “stressful” but said local funding would continue. The building, due to be completed in May, has a campaign balance of $428,000, Lodge said.