Federal Insider: Staffing, budget shortages put Indian Health Service at 'high risk'

There’s a sliver of good news for a stricken federal agency during the first alarming month of President Trump’s administration: relief from Trump’s hiring freeze for the Indian Health Service (IHS).

“This exemption is a step in the right direction,” seven Democratic senators said in a statement Friday. “Indian Health Services facilities face staff vacancy rates of 20 percent or higher, and a hiring freeze would make these challenges even more severe, further impacting access to health care and even patient health.”

Unfortunately, that step won’t necessarily improve the agency, but perhaps it will prevent it from getting even worse. The hardships for IHS and other Native American programs are already so severe that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) added them to its “high-risk list” last week, calling them “ineffectively administered.”

[Federal managers say Trump’s hiring freeze hurts government]

That bureaucratically bland language points to more dramatic, serious complications. The long-troubled medical system serves a population with severe afflictions — including a significantly lower life expectancy rate and drastically higher death, infant mortality and disease rates than for white people. Although IHS has increased funding for contracting out some health-care services, the GAO reported that the program “is unable to pay for all eligible services, and that these gaps in services sometimes delay diagnoses and treatments, which can exacerbate the severity of a patient’s condition and necessitate more intensive treatment.”

After a long history of racist and bloody treatment at the hands of Uncle Sam, he continues to shortchange the nation’s first peoples.

“The chronic underfunding of IHS and a lack of accountability measures are hamstringing the agency and its ability to provide timely, quality care,” said Marnee Banks, a spokesperson for Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. “Folks in Congress are always quick to criticize IHS without first looking in the mirror. IHS receives less than half of what is needed to provide quality, year-round care to folks in Indian Country. Congress invests $3,000 per capita on Indian health care; this is compared to $5,000 per capita on state prison inmates and $12,000 per capita on Medicare beneficiaries.”

[Back pay awarded because of 2013 government shutdown]

IHS flunked its way to a spot on the high-risk list after reports from the GAO and others about poor conditions confronting American Indians and Native Alaskans. In October, we wrote about an inspector general’s report on a variety of maladies, including long patient wait times, outdated equipment, staffing shortages and even sewage in one IHS operating room.