With heating oil continuing to sit above $6 a gallon, Mass. Governor Maura Healey declared [Executive Order 659] a state of energy emergency last week to unlock $150 million in relief. She says the aim is to help middle class families. Alison Kuznitz of the State House News Service explains the timelines and measures that residents should know about with this 'energy emergency'.
Alison Kuznitz, SHNS: There are a bunch of moving parts. There will be extra heating assistance benefits to low income households, so households that heat with oil will get a 20% bump in home heating assistance, and households that heat with utilities will get a 15% increase. And that assistance is going to start on November 1st. There is also a new middle class home heating assistance for households that are earning between 60% and 100% of the state median income.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: Those middle income households are families of four that bring in up to $171,000 a household?
Yes.
And that's going to benefit around 50,000 households. They're set to receive about $680 per household, and that will kick in in December. The governor's plan also calls for temporarily waiving clean energy charges from January through March.
Executive orders like this, energy emergency and temporary fee waivers, they buy time. But what are lawmakers actually doing about the underlying policy drivers that keep pushing winter energy costs to emergency levels year after year?
Sure. So, the governor's action here really comes in the absence of energy affordability legislation. There's been energy affordability legislation closely watched by the governor, of course, residents who are about to start turning on their heat if they haven't already.
So, this legislation has been hung up in conference committee. Under new legislative rules, lawmakers don't need to agree to a compromise donate to pass a bill until really the end of the session, which is in January. The House version of the Energy Affordability Bill, claims that it would save ratepayers $9 billion over the next decade, and the Senate version claims it would save ratepayers $14 billion over that same time period.
Open enrollment for Massachusetts online health insurance marketplaces opens October 23rd. Enrollees are looking at average rate jumps of more than 10% and changes to federal rules. Now, last year, state leaders had to step in with an extra quarter billion dollars just to keep lower income residents covered. Alison, from a Beacon Hill perspective, how are lawmakers looking at stepping in to help with the losses this year?
So right now, we're not seeing state leaders just jumping in and adding more money to stave off coverage losses. What we are seeing from the [Massachusetts Health] Connector side is a focus on education and outreach, and letting certain immigrant populations know that while they are losing their eligibility for subsidies, they can still enroll in Health Connector plans, albeit at full cost, which is going to be a substantial increase.
The Connector is also focused on alerting other categories of immigrants, including green card holders and Haitian entrants that they continue to be eligible for federal subsidies. So some immigrants, but not all immigrants are losing their federal subsidies.
So are you hearing any political appetite for another multimillion dollar state bailout right now?
I don't think so.
What we see is that the governor recently filed a supplemental budget that creates a new health care stabilization fund. So this could be a new lifeline for agencies like the [Massachusetts Health] Connector and MassHealth.
But of course, the state is balancing many other federal healthcare challenges beyond just the Connector. So, for example, MassHealth and the new Medicaid work requirements are going to come into play in January, and we could see major coverage losses from that.
Later this week, lawmakers will hold a hearing focused on the proposed federal changes to the 2030 U.S. census. The Census Bureau's draft rules strip out standard demographic questions on race and ethnicity and sexual orientation, exclude most non-citizens from population totals, and change how seasonal residents and people living in group settings. People who live in college dorms and in nursing homes get counted.
'Census math' can feel pretty distant and irrelevant. But it's not here in Western Mass. We have high concentrations of college campuses, nursing homes, and seasonal residents. What are lawmakers thinking about as they look deeply into these tweaks, and what could they mean for our representation in state funding?
Lawmakers who are already grappling with the prospect of massive federal funding cuts will now need to think about a loss in funding if the apportionment counts are significantly lower. If you're not counting the boon of college students in places like western Massachusetts. So that's going to affect Medicaid dollars.
And also the loss of racial and ethnic data is going to affect policy makers efforts to curb disparities across healthcare, across housing, across all these different policy areas.
It just adds another layer of complexity to the funding piece.
