Important resources for low-income Medicare beneficiaries.

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CCHCC can help!

May 9, 2023

If you are – or if you know of – a low-income Medicare beneficiary, there are important programs that help reduce out-of-pocket expenses to help make Medicare, prescriptions, and food more affordable. And CCHCC can help our community members enroll in those programs!

There are helpful programs that too many people do not know about, and are going underutilized by the people who need them the most.

These programs included Medicare Savings, Medicare Extra Help, and SNAP (food stamps).

Please read below to learn more about these programs, and how to get help with these programs for yourself, or someone you know.

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Take Action TODAY! The Rothner’s are requesting to sell off the nursing home AGAIN!

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March 14, 2023

Tonight, the Champaign County Board will meet as the Committee of the Whole, and, as part of the meeting, will consider another request from the Rothners to be allowed to sell the former Champaign County Nursing Home to an entity that would use the space to create a drug and alcohol treatment center.
 
The Rothners are asking the County Board, once again, to let them out of the covenant where they promised to continue to operate the nursing home for at least 10 years. The Rothners have only operated the former County Nursing Home, now called University Rehabilitation Services of C-U, for less than four years.

CCHCC isurging community members to contact their County Board Members, or the County Board as a whole, to oppose the Rothner’s request to sell the nursing home. And/or, people can speak during public participation at tonight’s County Board Committee of the Whole Meeting, which starts at 6:30 p.m. The Agenda Packet for tonight’s meeting is posted here.

There has been some coverage about this in the news, which you can see here.

The Rothners are claiming that no harm would come to the community as a result of selling the former County Nursing Home and converting it to another type of treatment facility. But this is false. Right now, many community members who need nursing home or rehab care are being sent to facilities away from our community, where it is hard for their families and friends to visit them regularly. If this nursing home goes away, our community will have lost a total of three nursing homes, thanks to the Rothners.

The Rothners should NOT be allowed to sell the nursing home, and they MUST be made to abide by the covenant they signed when they were given permission to buy the former County Nursing Home.

READ ON FOR Q&A!

We are expanding services for special populations – please support CCHCC!

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March 2023

Champaign County Health Care Consumers (CCHCC) is undertaking an enormous effort to serve even more people in our community – specifically focusing on “special populations” that are low-income and underserved in our community, and who are suffering the ravages and strain of living in persistent poverty.

CCHCC is building new programs to significantly increase services to these special populations and bring greater health and economic stability to their lives: low-income seniors, low-income people with disabilities, homeless and near-homeless individuals, and pregnant and parenting women incarcerated in the County Jail. Please read on to learn more about our exciting new initiatives, and what you can do to help support these efforts.

Hope Village – a tiny homes village for chronically and medically fragile homeless individuals: After many experiences working with medically-fragile homeless individuals in 2021 to help them get housed, CCHCC developed the idea of creating a tiny homes village with intensive case management services for chronically homeless individuals in our community. We saw first-hand how our county’s current system of housing that is available for homeless individuals does not work well for a subset of homeless people: the chronically homeless and medically-fragile homeless individuals. These are individuals who have many challenges, traumas, and health problems, who are not able to be easily housed and maintained in permanent housing.

CCHCC is excited to be collaborating with Carle and UIUC to create “Hope Village” – a tiny homes village to house this extremely vulnerable population. We believe that “housing is health”. Stay tuned for more information on this exciting new project!

READ ON!

Medicaid’s continuous enrollment guarantee is ending.

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CCHCC can help!

Pandemic benefits established by Congress are coming to an end. One of the most important benefits has been the Medicaid Continuous Enrollment Guarantee, which is now coming to an end. This is often referred to as the “unwinding” of Medicaid.
 
Please read on for more information below, and to learn how Champaign County Health Care Consumers (CCHCC) can help those who have benefitted from Medicaid during the pandemic.
 
Background
The Families First Coronavirus Response Act created an important health care safeguard for the poorest Americans – Medicaid eligibility and continuous enrollment in Medicaid, for people who might have otherwise lost it during the COVID pandemic.
 
This benefit allowed people to remain on Medicaid without having to go through the usual redetermination process, which is often fraught and often results in people losing their Medicaid coverage. This benefit has been in place for nearly three years. But now, as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022, Congress has set March 31, 2023 as a firm date for the end of continuous coverage.
 
After that date, states will once again have to conduct eligibility redeterminations for Medicaid. This will require states to do in a matter of months what they previously would have been doing continuously over multiple years.

READ ON!