Paul Szmal: FLX Morning continues now on Finger Lakes News Radio, coming up on 8-16, it's 68. And I am happy to be joined by the CEO of Finger Lakes Community Health, Mary Zelazny. Mary, good morning. How are you this morning?
Mary Zelazny: Good morning. I'm great. How are you?
Paul Szmal: Ah, doing well. Doing well.
I kind of get the feeling that right now Finger Lakes Community Health is at kind of a crossroads. Would you agree with that assessment?
Mary Zelazny: Well, I think all of us in the healthcare industry are at a crossroads because of so many changes that are happening at the federal level, which will then impact state and then our counties and ultimately the organizations that serve everybody that lives in those counties. So yeah, it's an interesting time. It's a difficult time because we can't plan, you know, and the problem with that is that healthcare organizations in general, hospitals, community health centers, behavioral health programs, we can't run on uncertainty. And that's kind of where we are right now. So it's been a difficult time for a lot of us to just try to figure out what's next.
Paul Szmal: Can you explain, if you have any idea, what these federal cuts are going to do to things like the community health centers that Finger Lakes Community Health operates?
Mary Zelazny: Well, so what the bill, H.R. 1, or the big beautiful bill if you prefer, has put into place is some pretty drastic cuts to the Medicaid system. And other things that impact healthcare systems a little bit in the Medicare space, food stamps or SNAP, same thing. So those cuts are going to force people off of Medicaid because certain people are not going to be eligible anymore and others are going to find it very difficult to stay on their health insurance, particularly Medicaid, because what the Congress has done is has said, OK, instead of every year recertifying for your health insurance through the Medicaid system, now you got to do it twice a year. And it's a lot. If you've ever been through the process, it's not easy to get on Medicaid. And now we're going to ask people to do it twice a year. And it's not just the patient. Someone has to help them through that, our DSS offices, other people that help folks get on Medicaid or other health insurance programs. It's an administrative nightmare. And that's going to let people are going to not be able to do it or they'll miss a document that they have to send in. And so they're going to lose their health insurance.
And that is a very expensive proposition for all of us, because it doesn't stop people from needing health care by cutting Medicaid. All it does is shift where people have to go. And not every provider wants to see people without without insurance. It's hard now, even if you have Medicaid, to find providers in many circumstances and particularly in rural communities. You know, we just don't have enough providers anyway. But for community health centers, we see everybody and we see everybody regardless of their ability to pay or what their insurance is. So okay, we have Medicaid patients that we serve. And if they lose their Medicaid, we hope they'll still come to us because they're our patients and we're invested in them. And but it's going to be challenging for them. Because if I have to send them to a specialist, how are they going to pay for that? If they have to have a procedure, how are they going to pay for that? So it'll also push people to the emergency room because they won't have insurance and they'll feel compelled to find some place to get care. And we know that an emergency room visit costs at least four times as much as they if a patient just goes to their primary care doc. So it's expensive.
Paul Szmal: Do you think that people are unaware of just how much of an effect these Medicaid cuts are going to have?
Mary Zelazny: I do. And I I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of community members across the Finger Lakes region. And what's what's interesting is a lot of people say to me, well, geez, I don't have Medicaid. So that's not going to really affect me. And I remind them that, yeah, it does. As we know, before the Affordable Care Act came into being way back in 2010 or whenever it was, it was the system was very expensive and people were using the emergency rooms for things that should not be gone, done in an emergency room. They should be done in a primary care office. And just because you don't have Medicaid, the impact on your community is going to impact you.
For instance, a good example for for people to understand. The more people that we have in the system that are uninsured means that the health insurance companies are going to have to pay out more money to hospitals, et cetera, to cover those people that don't have insurance. Right. And in that the hospital is going to get a bill and there someone has to pay that bill. The hospital is not going to just write it off. Right. So if you have a if you start seeing the expenses go up because people are using the most expensive kind of care we have, which is great care at the emergency room, but probably in many cases inappropriate, we want to keep people in primary care. Then the insurance companies are going to have to charge more money. They have no choice.
So me as the CEO of a private organization or a regular organization business, I we pay right now almost one and a half million dollars for health insurance for our employees. And we already have been told it's going to go up considerably for 2026 because of the rising costs already. They and the anticipated costs that are coming because of the cuts. So it's going to affect all businesses and particularly smaller businesses that don't have the ability to absorb a 25 percent increase in health insurance costs for their employees. How are they going to pay that? So it does impact all of us in a lot of ways.
Paul Szmal: We're talking with Mary Zelazny, who is the CEO of Finger Lakes Humanity Health here on FLX Morning. Mary, is there going to be any effect on people that go through the New York State Health Exchange to get their health insurance or is it too early to tell?
Mary Zelazny: Well, the tax. So right now there's tax credits that people get that are in place so that people that go through the health exchange and get some kind of an insurance plan. Some of our folks will be familiar with the bronze, the silver, the gold plans, those plans. What happens is you apply for those plans, you get it, and the federal government always had tax credits so that you would get a pretty good discount, if you will, on what you had to out of pocket pay monthly for your health insurance policy. And it made it very affordable for people. And why is that important? Because when you have health insurance, you are able to go to a primary care doctor. You are able to go to get your care at the reasonably priced primary care system that we have. But those credits are going away. So they already anticipate, you know, the all the economic people anticipate that those plans could potentially double in price. And so many people that have been able to access health insurance through that program are now going to not be able to afford it.
Paul Szmal: Do you see a light at the end of the tunnel anywhere?
Mary Zelazny: Listen, I think that community health centers, there's 1500 of us across the United States, 15000 individual sites where we see patients. Last year, we served over 34 million people. That's one in 10 Americans. And I think we are a really great response to some of the pressures of the health care system, because we we know that by studies that have been done by a lot of different organizations that have no association with us, that the care that a community health center program offers is more affordable and very effective for patients.
And so we're a system that is highly focused on quality, all of our quality metrics, if you will, or where our patients stand in terms of the quality of care that they're getting. We've had to post that data on the Internet since 2010 community health centers across the whole country. So our data is out there. We're very transparent. We hire a lot of people. We offer good long term jobs for communities, particularly more rural communities where we're an economic engine, because we do have the ability to offer those kind of jobs and those kind of services to the communities we serve.
We we think that we need to focus on building a primary care system in this country that works for people, that addresses the whole person, because community health centers offer medical, dental, behavioral health and other care management and other support services to help people get through the health care system, because it's not an easy thing to do. And we need to we need to invest in that so that people, everybody doesn't matter if you're wealthy. It doesn't matter if you're maybe from a lower socioeconomic level. Everybody deserves health care because it is the way for us to keep the health care system functioning and reasonably, you know, the reasonably cost.
So we have to rebuild our health care system because it's it's falling apart because we're trying to make these draconian cuts, but it's not going to save the system any money. We know it's not going to save the system money. It's going to cost more. And it's we have to build a better mousetrap. And we think that the community health center program is a really great option, in addition to some of our other partners that we work with, to rebuild a more effective health care system in this country.
Paul Szmal: That's Mary Zelazny, who is the CEO of Finger Lakes Community Health. By the way, today is the next to last day of National Health Center Week. So congratulations. And I keep my fingers crossed for a hopeful future. Mary, thank you for joining us and filling us in this morning.
Mary Zelazny: Thank you so much. Have a great day.
