Voter's Guide
Indian health clinic looks for shot in arm
By Tim Carpenter
HORTON — Hope Waupoose is lucky to live within walking distance of the Kickapoo Nation Health Center.
She is six months into a high-risk pregnancy that may culminate with a doctor's order of total bed rest.
Beth Wabnum utilizes the Kickapoo Nation Health Center facilities to treat back pain.
Angie Thomas, a nurse at the Kickapoo Nation Health Center, draws blood from Hope Waupoose as part of her ongoing care of her diabetes. The health center is facing a funding crisis.
Assessment of her vital signs at the reservation's modest one-story health center by nurse Angie Thomas reflected a previous diagnosis. Gestational diabetes and high blood pressure makes Waupoose's pregnancy a challenge. She will rely on insulin injections until her daughter is born.
"I've been through it before," said Waupoose, of the Chippewa. "It's hard."
Her condition isn't the only crisis point on the Kickapoo reservation north of Topeka. The clinic built in the shadow of the tribe's casino is on financial life support.
Budget woes
Kickapoo tribal leaders declared a health care emergency and requested $150,000 from the U.S. Indian Health Service to get the clinic through the fiscal year ending Sept. 30.
"There has been no response to our letter," said Josephine Bellonger, clinic director. "That's put us in a bind. It's really getting to a critical stage."
Robbin Williams, spokeswoman for Indian Health Service's region that includes Kansas, said this was the season clinics serving the nation's 1.9 million recipients of tribal health care routinely grapple with budget issues.
"So close to the end of the year," Williams said, "they're life and limb."
Bellonger said federal appropriations to the Kickapoo clinic for contracted medical services was $200,000 below the amount allocated to the clinic in its first year of operation in 1992.
Rising U.S. health care costs and an increase in the number of patients using the Kickapoo's clinic amplifies the predicament, Bellonger said. Growth in the volume of patients with serious medical conditions places additional strain on clinic resources, she said.
The Kickapoo's clinic serves 2,900 Indians in Brown, Doniphan and Jackson counties in Kansas and Richardson County in southeast Nebraska. Eighty percent of the center's $1.5 million budget comes from federal sources, with tribes contributing $300,000.
...
Rep. Nancy Boyda, a Democrat who represents a congressional district that includes the Kickapoo reservation, is convinced the Indian Health Care Improvement Act passed by the Senate in February and awaiting a House vote could produce future budgets that more accurately reflect tribal medical needs.
"She looks forward to voting on that bill," said Liz Montano, spokeswoman for Boyda.
Forty percent of the Kickapoo clinic's patients don't have health insurance. Horton resident Beth Wabnum, a mother of three, has the benefit of insurance and comes to the tribal clinic to fill prescriptions for back pain. She said interruption of clinical services due to budget shortcomings would be deeply felt.
"This community relies on this clinic," she said. "Personally, I would suffer. The care of my children would suffer."
Powered by NGP Software.