By Joel Magalnick , Editor, JTNews
Social-service agencies often hold their breath at the end of each legislative session, hoping their programs won’t be cut in that year’s budget. This year was even more of a nail-biter given the surprise special sessions that pushed lawmakers into all-night budget negotiations. In the end, human-service programs that had been axed in a breakaway budget passed by Senate Republicans and three Democrats were kept at levels similar to last year’s budget.
“We were very nervous,” said Zach Carstensen, director of government relations and public affairs for the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, which lobbies in Olympia on behalf of Jewish agencies. “A lot of us felt that many of these programs were on borrowed time. They had endured cuts and reforms in past years and without significant new revenue or other budget changes outside of the human services context they would be lost.”
Where the Caroline Kline Galland and Affiliates Jewish nursing facility made out reasonably well was in the legislature maintaining its Medicaid reimbursement levels.
“In the current state of the economy a tie is a win,” said Kline Galland CEO Jeff Cohen. “These days it’s all about reimbursement on the state level.”
A consistent reimbursement rate on Medicaid still means a 2 to 3 percent cut for the Kline Galland budget, Cohen said, because of increases in overhead costs, but “we’ll be able to hold the line on staff wages and benefits as well as the high quality services that we provide to our residents.”
Though one bill that received broad support across the Jewish community passed the Senate unanimously, it ran out of time in the House. Senate Bill 6068 was drafted after Brian Grobois, an Orthodox Jewish man from New York, died while hiking on Mt. Rainier in December. A dispute between Grobois’s family and the Pierce County coroner’s office about whether an autopsy should be performed — desecration of a body is a violation of Jewish law — resulted in middle-of-the-night interventions by Rabbi Zalman Heber of Chabad of Pierce County and court injunctions being delivered as the coroner was preparing to begin his work. The bill would have created a grace period and options for surviving relatives to work through a compromise with medical examiners.
“Naturally I was quite disappointed that we got this far…and then it got stalled to be brought up in the House,” Heber said.
More disappointing, Heber said, was that last month he received a call from the family of a man who died in his hotel room while visiting Seattle. The King County medical examiner wanted to do an autopsy against the wishes of the family. The family eventually allowed the autopsy to go through because they didn’t want to deal with the courts, Heber said.
“If it would have passed the House, we would have called up the medical examiner, there would have been the 24- to 48-hour break, and we would have sat around the table and discussed it,” he said.
Rabbi Moshe Kletenik of Congregation Bikur Cholim Machzikay Hadath worked with legislators, including bill sponsor Sen. Adam Kline, and the Jewish Federation to seek passage of the bill. He said the language was based on identical laws in other states and cited a memorandum from New York State to Sen. Kline that only two cases in 23 years had had to involve the courts.
Kletenik also noted that Jewish law allows for autopsies in cases of homicide or possible public health threats. Additionally, he said, “we never have an objection to non-invasive procedures such as blood samples or urine samples, which is really what’s necessary to do a tox screen, or to do an MRI or other non-invasive procedures.”
Finally, the big news early in the session — passage of the marriage-equality bill supported by 26 local and national Jewish organizations — is still supported by those agencies, the Federation’s Carstensen said.
“There is a lot of work to be done and that is where the coalition members are putting their energy,” he said.
A referendum to overturn the legislation continues its signature-gathering process to put the measure on the ballot in November. Should there not be enough signatures obtained by June 7, the law will go into effect then.