Health

The Chemung County YMCA announced at the beginning of the year that it was unable to continue operating due to financial reasons.

News of the closure spurred a flurry of activity from local residents. About 2,000 people signed a petition asking county officials to save the Y, and small grassroots groups worked to find a solution to keep it operating and solvent.

Those efforts paid off. The former Y was adopted by The Senior Center, which will lease the facility from the county and operate it as an annex for the next 12 months.

Providence faces a $110-million deficit, enormous pension problems and the aftershocks of a three-year recession. Mayor Angel Taveras unveiled a plan to tax nine tax-exempt hospitals, colleges and universities, a move that could raise $7 million more in the year that begins July 1. Without that amount, and other cost-saving measures, Taveras said the city may “free-fall over the edge into dark, uncharted territory.”

The mayor’s request follows a similar one by Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who has asked 40 major nonprofits to make partial payments on property worth $13.6 billion.

HealthCare 21 Business Coalition plans to seek a federal loan that will allow it to create a nonprofit health-insurance company run by consumers.

The Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan, included in recent health reform legislation, supports the development of these health cooperatives, which will sell qualified health plans through state insurance exchanges and individual and small-group insurance markets.

Healthcare 21 has already formed a team to apply for funding, which will be used to create consumer-oriented alternatives to commercial models of health insurance. At least one CO-OP will be allowed in each state.

Texas’ proposed budget cuts will likely have a disproportionate effect on children’s hospitals. The financial implications won't halt operations. But it will mean cutting back on expansions needed to serve a growing population of children and efforts to recruit and retain the best specialists and faculty, said Texas Children’s Hospital's Ben Melson.

The disparity hinges on Medicaid, the joint state-federal health care program that covers nearly three million children in Texas. State lawmakers, facing huge budget shortfalls, cannot find the multibillion-dollar savings they need without cutting already skimpy Medicaid provider rates.

Developing genetic interventions that target the immune system and creating personalized cancer vaccines are just two of more than 80 innovative research grants being funded this year by Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The world’s largest breast cancer organization announced it will fund $55 million toward research grants at 56 institutions across the U.S. and internationally in 2011 and nearly $3 million toward 33 grants to support patient support conferences and programs.

The needs of underserved communities are the top priority of less than a third of 880 foundations and institutional grantmakers that give billions of dollars for health-related causes in the U.S., a new report says.

Only 28 percent of 363 foundations that that gave at least $1 million on average in domestic health grants from 2007 to 2008 dedicated at least half their grantmaking for the intended benefit of underserved communities, says the report from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

Children's Miracle Network Hospitals, a charity that raises funds for 170 children's hospitals across North America, announced a new partnership with 2010 PGA TOUR Player of the Year Jim Furyk. Furyk has named Children's Miracle Network Hospitals as his charity of choice for the next two years.

To kick off the partnership, Children's Miracle Network Hospitals and Furyk are launching Miracle Birdies, a new fundraising program in which individuals, groups and sponsors can make a monetary pledge for each time Furyk makes a birdie during his tournament play in 2011.

Health care fundraising showed signs of progress last year, but far from enough to erase two years of recessionary losses and cutbacks, according to members of the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy (AHP), who direct development efforts for more than 2,000 nonprofit hospitals and health care providers throughout North America.

While the vast majority (71 percent) of AHP members who answered a January survey reported negative effects on their programs in 2010 due to the recession, these responses represented a 16 percent improvement over 2009.

The fourth grade at Adams School in Midland has been working on a fundraiser for Smile Train, a nonprofit that provides cleft palate surgeries for impoverished children around the world.

Students held a T-shirt design contest in which three students’ designs were chosen to be silk-screened on T-shirts with the phrase, “With A Smile, Every Day’s A Great Day At Adams!” and Smile Train's website, with all profits going to Smile Train.

Thirty-one percent of foundations that give money to improve people’s health direct at least half of those grant dollars to poor communities, according to a new study by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group in Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, 4 percent give at least a quarter of their health grants to advocacy and organizing work.