Hundreds of county workers, immigrant-rights advocates, and labor unions filled the Santa Barbara County Administration Building Tuesday morning, urging supervisors to stop two controversial proposals that could reshape the county’s health-care and social-service systems.
At issue are two separate, but closely connected items: a Public Health Department plan to disenroll thousands of undocumented patients from county clinics, and a Department of Social Services restructuring plan that could eliminate more than 100 positions.
County Public Health Director Dr. Mouhanad Hammami told supervisors that the department faces a major funding shortfall after federal rule changes reclassified Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) as providers of “federal public benefits.”
That reclassification means local health centers can no longer bill for care provided to patients with what the federal government calls “unsatisfactory immigration status.”…