Date	What’s Happening,
Tuesday, April 22, 2025 at The Hearth - 1915 N. Swan St.	Club Assembly – P. Falley will talk about The Rotary Foundation
Thur. Apr. 24 – Sat. Apr. 26	District Conference in El Paso
Tuesday, April 29, 2025	Ben Rasmussen – Frontier Food Hub
Sat., May 17, 2025	Epic Day of Service

Announcements: Art introduced Jake Politte who prepared our lunch meal. Art also told us that we would be meeting at The Hearth again next week. Art also reminded everyone that Give Grandly on May 3 needs help with setup and take down. Set
up is at 6:30 am, and there are Rotary vests for participants to wear. The take down is at 2 pm. If you want to volunteer for that, see him. On May 17 we are joining Toss No MAs at the
Sustainability office to get supplies for picking up trash for our Epic Day of Service. We will have a speaker on May 6 who will give us details

 

Happy Dollars: Peter Falley had two happy dollars: one for Maggie Callaway who furnished the brownies and the other for Kathy Eaton who had her 27th anniversary yesterday. Rosie Hicks said that she is going to Honduras again this summer. Because of the price increases, she is having a raffle to help with funding the trip. She is raffling two of her jewelry pieces; tickets are three for $10. She will be selling tickets until the middle of June. She passed around a signed Zuni necklace to show as one of the pieces

 

Art introduced Brian Etheridge of Blue Cross. He talked about Medicaid in New Mexico, Grant County, and the Federal level. He thanked Rotary International for the work they do to end polio. He had originally planned to be a teacher but after taking a job with the Health Department in 1994, he changed his career path and went into the medical field and became a pediatrician. He now works
for Blue Cross as their chief medical officer. Medicaid was established in 1965 as part of the Great Society program along with Medicare
during the Lyndon Johnson administration. It was designed to provide health insurance for
children and adults with limited resources. The program is jointly funded by state governments and by the Federal government. It is managed by states but the Federal government sets some
rules. All states participate in this program. It provides care to 83 million people in the US and in 2023 $880 billion was put into this program, 70 percent of this was contributed by the Federal government. It provides 50 percent of long term care spending, pays for 41 percent of all births, 50 percent of the care for kids with special needs and covers 1 out of 5 nursing home
residents. In New Mexico 830,000 people are covered; we have the highest rate of coverage of any of the states. It is the highest payer of health care in New Mexico. It also provides coverage for the “working poor”, not just the unemployed. Because of the Affordable Care Act, 95 percent of Grant County residents now have health coverage. About 40 percent have their coverage through Medicaid. The child poverty rate in our county is 33 percent, for adults 19%. About 20 percent of county residents receive food stamps. He discussed proposed changes to the Medicaid program by the current administration which would mean some fairly sizeable cuts. The State could loose $4 million a year and there would be a lot more uninsured and in the ER more, and
probably 8 hospitals would have to close their doors within 3 years. He touched on medical malpractice as being one of the big issues for our State. The lack of a cap on punitive damages has made it hard to recruit medical personnel. The State has 2,000
openings for physicians. Medicaid has been actively engaged in the fighting the measles outbreak. One of the challenging issues in Grant County is care coordination so that everyone dealing with a particular patient is aware of what other providers are doing and what the patient's unmet needs are.

Brian then asked for questions.

 

After a question and answer period, Art adjourned the meeting.