General Assembly 2014 update
Over the weekend of March 8 and 9, the General Assembly concluded its regular 60-day session without passing a biennial budget for the commonwealth.
Both the House of Delegates and the Senate passed budgets that differ by only 1 percent, but the session expired with no consensus on several key issues, most notably whether to expand Medicaid in Virginia. The House and Senate do not agree on whether to accept federal dollars to finance health insurance coverage for people who are indigent but not currently eligible for Medicaid.
VCU and the VCU Health System are actively engaged on this issue. Without Medicaid expansion, or an alternative to provide funding for our safety-net mission, VCU Health System could lose up to $300 million in federal funds over a five-year period beginning in 2017.
It could also erode the more than $70 million contribution that the VCU Health System makes to the university’s School of Medicine every year. These funds are critical to our academic missions of teaching and research. Without this support, we cannot educate the next generation of health professionals or conduct life-saving research.
Because there is no state budget yet, and there are still competing proposals for higher education funding, our own budget picture remains unclear. However, there is some good news: the General Assembly has agreed on a number of issues that will continue to provide significant support for our research agenda.
For example, we anticipate that we will receive at least $1 million additional per year for VCU Massey Cancer Center, long a priority for our lawmakers. We also expect to receive $650,000 per year for Parkinson’s Disease research and $500,000 per year for a state-of-the-art compounding lab in the School of Pharmacy. We believe we will be permitted to move forward on renovations to Sanger Hall. These items are included in both the House and Senate budgets, but any final allocations to VCU depend on the final budget.
Gov. McAuliffe has called for a special session of the General Assembly beginning March 24. State lawmakers would then have until July 1 to pass a new budget.
I will keep you updated in the coming weeks and months on important news related to this special session and its impacts on our budget. In the meantime, members of our team are fully engaged however we can be as resources for our lawmakers.
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