Kansas Health Institute | Information For Policy Makers. Health for Kansans.

TOPEKA — A House budget committee has recommended spending an additional $635,000 on the state’s safety-net clinics.

To pay for the increase, the committee voted to cut funding for smoking prevention and cessation programs by almost 64 percent.

“I’m just trying to put additional dollars into our community health centers because they do such a good job,” said Rep. Peggy Mast, an Emporia Republican and a member of the House Social Services Budget Committee.

Mast introduced the amendments that resulted in both the proposed increase in spending on safety-net clinics and, minutes later, the proposed reduction in support for smoking prevention and cessation grants.

“I’m not for smoking,” Mast told KHI News Service afterward. “I just think that as a society we’ve been discouraging it since our childhoods. We’ve put warnings on cigarette packages, we’ve stopped having cigarette commercials on TV, we don’t let actors (on TV) smoke anymore. There are very few people out there who don’t understand the dangers of smoking.”

Rather than paying prevention programs to continue sending a message that’s been sent many times over, she said, the money could be better spent helping safety-net clinics take on more patients.

The committee’s recommendations now go to the full House Appropriations Committee.

Mary Jane Hellebust, head of the Tobacco Free Kansas Coalition, said the proposed cut would be a “devastating” setback to prevention and cessation efforts going on across the state.

“Over the past 10 years, Kansas has made good progress in decreasing the (tobacco-use) prevalence rates in adults and youths,” Hellebust said, “But we’re not at a level where we can say the problem is solved.”

Between 2000 and 2010, she said, the percentage of high school students who smoked fell from 26 percent to 17 percent.

“If our funding is shut off, that prevalence rate will flatten out,” Hellebust predicted. “It won’t decrease on its own. It’s like any other problem, it needs funding, effective strategies, best practices, and people.”

The cut, she said, ultimately would lead to more people with chronic conditions relying on safety-net clinics.

“In a way,” she said, “the committee is robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

In Kansas, smoking prevention and cessation efforts have long been funded with proceeds – about $1 million a year - from the state’s Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement with the nation’s leading tobacco companies.

The money is used to underwrite grants to county health departments, school districts, and social service agencies.

Late last year, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment told Gov. Sam Brownback’s office that it could go along with spending $310,000 on the grants in the upcoming fiscal year. The Governor’s Office, however, proposed spending $1 million.

Mast’s amendment dropped the proposed funding to about $365,000.

“The feeling of the committee is that we get more bang for the buck with funding safety net clinics than we do with tobacco prevention and cessation,” said Rep. David Crum, an Augusta Republican and chair of the committee. “They’re both important programs. It just came down to a setting of priorities.”

Rep. Jerry Henry, a Cummings Democrat, voted against cutting the tobacco programs.

"We get millions of dollars from the tobacco companies," he said. "It doesn't seem right that we turn around and spend so little on prevention."

Henry said the vote was "pretty much Republicans versus Democrats." Of the committee's nine members, two are Democrats.

Also this week, a Senate Ways and Means subcommittee agreed to recommend spending an additional $635,000 on safety-net clinics. It did not recommend taking the money from the tobacco programs.

Currently, the state’s safety-net clinics receive about $7 million in state funding.