New Admin, New Opportunities
KEEP IT UP - GOOD THINGS ARE HAPPENING
Sending you all the good vibrations as we enter a new and exciting time for FQHC Look-Alikes (LALs). The past three months, we have been busy connecting with folks across the United States. We’ve added several new organizations to our partners page, have connected with several politicians and lobbyists, have struck the attention of appropriations members, have drafted and distributed several advocacy letters, held conference calls, and we are proud to say things are picking up and moving in the right direction.
Within days of taking over, the new administration began prioritizing FQHCs for funding, as its clear they understand the importance of the FQHC network. It is our collective responsibility to educate these folks to the importance and inclusion of LALs, to the inequities LALs face. And we can waste no time! Writing to you today, to ask for your feedback. We are drafting another open letter to HRSA and would like to include your concerns.
NACHC will help us in these efforts and has become a valuable partner in recent months. LAL-specific trainings and advocacy efforts are at top priorities for NACHC in 2021. Their LAL Learning collaborative will be announced soon and we highly encourage you participate. We’ve even heard discussion of development of a LAL-specific membership rate. We’ve been able to communicate LAL need, history, scenarios, and technical difficulties. And we thank NACHC for hearing us out and helping us out.
We’re asking LAL finance departments to begin drafting their concerns, gathering statistics that demonstrate the pitfalls of LAL designation. If you are a CFO interested in helping us stress the numbers, please reach out. We’d love to work with you to develop some useful tools. A LAL CFO roundtable would be extremely helpful to NACHC and HRSA to inform the math for future funding opportunities. In November, NACHC published that only 19% of LALs who received funding had drawn down funds. Surely the percentage is higher now, but still very alarming and effective in relaying to NACHC that even those who received funding are having trouble managing and accessing it.
As you know by now, administrators of Social Security and HHS have flexibility to bend/modify rules for LALs, opening us to funding. The only way this is going to happen is by educating them to the inequities. In their first day in office, President Biden’s administration launched a “whole of government equity agenda.” The Executive Order is aimed at identifying “entrenched disparities in our laws and public policies, and in our public and private institutions…[calling for] an ambitious whole of government equity agenda that matches the scale of the opportunities and challenges that we face.” This is a perfect opportunity for us to highlight the diversity of communities we serve, to stress the inequities LAL patients face with a lack of funding, meeting all the demands of FQHC grantees. Especially, as we are expected to transform our model of service delivery amidst the pandemic.
We appreciate you, your staff, your patients, and all that you do to go above and beyond for your communities. We are hopeful for 2021 and look forward to partnering with you to raise the voice for LALs.
Be well,
Look Alike Advocacy
