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By Lyle Hillyard
Senate Chair of the Executive Appropriations Committee

This past weekend, I saw an opinion piece in the Deseret News by my good friend Don Gale urging that the legislature reconsider its action and restore the funding for the University of Utah medical school. My first response is that the legislature did not cut the medical school's funding. The explanation is a little complicated, but important nonetheless. It was reported to me by the University that the U of U medical school used to draw down federal Medicaid money for medical education. It did so for about eight years until Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported to the Department of Health that medical education no longer qualified. So the U of U medical school lost 30% of its total funding (on top of the 9% state cut). They requested $10.0 M, not to "restore funding" cut by the state but rather to fill-in for lost federal money. The second problem was that if the U of U medical school was cut (which was being proposed for all Higher Education because of the reduction in revenue), their only choice was to reduce the student body by 20 students beginning the fall of 2010. At that time, it was not clear exactly what the cuts would be and what could be back-filled with one-time money, principally from the rainy day funds.

As the session came to an end and we could see that the base cut to Higher Education would be 15% but reduced to 9% with the one-time back fill, I was again approached by the U medical school leaders. At that time, we absolutely did not have the $10.0 M in additional on-going funding to restore their federal funding, unless we took it out of other areas of Higher Education. The actions we took the week before to fund the growth in Public Education at last year’s funding level had caused a huge strain on the budget. To do it again across the board to every other state program just to hold the medical school harmless would have been very ugly, especially with on-going funding.

We granted the requests from all of the institutions to allow them the flexibility to make the cuts individually, because they should know which programs could be reduced. For example, Utah State University chose to adopt a 5-day furlough (the only institution in the state to do it) as one of their ways to meet the shortfall. If the medical school did not like the reductions made by their own institution, they should address the problem in-house. If they want the legislature to solve it, we must do it by making budget cuts to other programs at the U to free up this funding to give to the medical school.

Again, the simple answer to the question that began these remarks is that the legislature did not cut the medical school funding. We did what we could for all of Higher Education to cope with the reduction in tax revenue. We allowed each school to address these reductions in the best way they saw fit. I noted that the U raised their tuition more than any other school as one way to reduce the hurt. If they believed that reducing the funding for the medical school was the less of many evils with budget shortfalls, the legislature must respect that decision. I am sure that each school could point out the negative impacts of the reductions they suffered.

I heard from people at USU that some top people were threatening to leave because of the furloughs. Should the legislature raise taxes to save all of them? I thought we had done a very good job in taking a 15% reduction in tax revenue and reducing the cut to an effective 9%. Things may get worse before they get better. The 2011 budget will cause us a struggle next session. It cannot be solved by a cigarette or alcohol tax increase either.

I am open to suggested areas of budget reductions at the University of Utah that would free up money to avoid the reduction in enrollment at the medical school or alternatives to reducing the enrollment.

1 Comments:

 Anonymous said...

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1/12/2010 10:06 AM  

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