More Alaskans will be eligible for food stamps and access to health care for school-age children and young adults will increase under a new state law.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy sponsored the original legislation, whose goal was to expand the services covered by Medicaid to include things like workforce development and food security. The bill takes advantage of a federal waiver that allows states to consider the underlying causes of ill health in granting benefits.
The legislation was amended to include a proposal from Anchorage Rep. Genevieve Mina and Anchorage Sen. Cathy Giessel aimed at increasing SNAP (food stamps) access after the Alaska Department of Health failed to process thousands of applications within the legal timeline in a backlog that left thousands of people without food aid for months at a time.
The state Senate passed the final version of the bill by a unanimous vote and the bill passed the House by a vote of 26-14 on the final day of the legislative session. The measure became law last month.
With the law’s passage, Alaska became the 43rd state to expand access to federal food assistance.
The law will increase the income threshold for food stamp applicants and allow them to have savings while using the program when it takes effect on July 1, 2025. Currently, SNAP participants may have only limited savings and may be no more than 30% above the federal poverty level.
Next summer, there will be no cut-off for the amount of savings or assets SNAP participants can have and the income threshold will be twice the federal poverty level.
“The SNAP program is a crucial tool for low-income households, but the income threshold was too low. As a result, people in need were going hungry or, in some cases, people were forced to turn down a better paying job because the pay difference was not enough to make up for the lost food benefits,” said Giessel in a news release.
Mina said the change means that Alaskans on the edge of those limits will not automatically lose SNAP benefits when they get a pay increase or save their money, which is called a “benefits cliff.”
The new law doesn’t eliminate the cliff entirely, Mina said, but it does reduce its severity with a graduated, step-down program as beneficiaries’ incomes increase — more of a hill than a cliff.
The new law also allows the state to be reimbursed by the federal government for health care services for students who are eligible for Medicaid. Anchorage Sen. Löki Tobin made an amendment to the bill that increased Medicaid eligibility.
“The students that will be helped are already eligible for Medicaid. … (The bill) simply allows health care services to be given to students in a more convenient location, which is often their school,” said Tobin in her newsletter on Sept. 3.
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