As the Iowa Legislature finished out a historic session with passing a “status quo” budget, one sector that causes concern with no increase in next fiscal year’s funding is rural hospitals.

An analysis by accounting firm CliftonLarsonAllen shows that Iowa hospitals have already lost $850 million because of COVID-19, and that figure is expected to rise to $1.2 billion by the end of this month. When asked about passing about the same budget as last year, House District 20 Representative Ray Sorensen (R) mentions that the House tried to negotiate funding levels as high as they could with the Senate proposing lower figures, “In the House caucus we were looking at the fact that our rainy day funds were full and that we have hundreds of millions of room based on the REC’s (Revenue Estimating Conference) revised estimates. And so I guess we negotiated hard and pushed up to keep us at, at least a status quo budget, and I’m glad we were able to fight for at least that amount. And I understand there are going to be priorities and areas of the budget that are hurting because they weren’t able to be adjusted up and we lost out on all that growth.”

You can hear more on this and other end-of-session topics in Monday’s Let’s Talk Guthrie County program with Sorensen at raccoonvalleyradio.com.