People have died after a state program was cut. Will lawmakers bring it back?
Four people have died after Idaho lawmakers discontinued funding for a program that helps people take their medication.
That’s according to Laura Scuri, who owns the agency that contracted with the state to run the program in the Boise up to McCall area. In the Legislature, it’s been a tough trek to get the money to restore what two Republicans called a “critical” service.
“We flipped the couches in the statehouse,” Scuri said. “We were searching under cushions for money.”
Medication non-adherence, or not taking medication as prescribed, is common but more challenging and risky for people with psychotic disorders, which the Assertive Community Treatment program sought to help with. The fourth patient death was first reported by the Idaho Capital Sun.
In August, Gov. Brad Little ordered 3% holdbacks by agencies to cut spending. The program ended in December, one of the few cuts the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare said it could make without violating Medicaid requirements.
“We told the state. We said, ‘Look, if you do this, it’ll take five weeks for people to start dying’” once the medications wear off, Scuri previously told the Statesman. In February, Shelley Republican Rep. Ben Fuhriman brought a bill to the House Health and Welfare Committee to try and fix the problem. Funding the program for the current fiscal year and next would cost over $5 million, according to his bill. But the program saves money and cutting it would lead to costs elsewhere, Fuhriman and the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare have said.
Rep. John Vander Woude, R-Nampa, the chair of the committee, told Fuhriman that he couldn’t support the bill if it used general fund money, and that he likely wouldn’t schedule a hearing on the bill. Hopefully, Vander Woude said, there would be an alternate way to fund the program.
“The budgets aren’t so much about what can we afford and what can we not afford,” Fuhriman said on a February edition of The Ranch Podcast released the day after he introduced his legislation. “It’s ’what do we want to afford?’ It’s all about prioritization.”
Rep. Josh Wheeler, R-Ammon, wrote to a constituent in an email that week that the “biggest” obstacle would be getting the state’s powerful budget committee to agree to funding.
On Monday, Wheeler told the Statesman that the program wasn’t specifically targeted by lawmakers, but it was still up against this year’s “fundamental conversation about the budget.”
“It just felt like there wasn’t the will to find funds this session, because there’s so many cuts happening,” Wheeler said.
In March, Fuhriman told the Statesman he was going another route to bring the program back: through the state’s budget committee. By late March, in the waning days of the legislative session, Assertive Community Treatment appeared on the committee’s agenda.
But it still faced an upward path, with lawmakers holding two votes to finally agree on the funding, settling on the lower number of the two amounts proposed. Ultimately, the state’s contribution for fiscal year 2027 will come from the tobacco and opioid settlement funds. The committee approved slightly over $4 million, with $6 million in matching funds coming through the federal government.
“I started to cry,” Scuri said. “We are grateful.”
But the funding doesn’t necessarily extend to the remaining three months of the 2026 fiscal year, which ends June 30. The budget committee voted to give Health and Welfare the authority to fund the program through the next few months but did not appropriate the money itself.
Spokesperson AJ McWhorter told the Statesman the department has “adequate one-time savings” to restore the services for the remainder of the fiscal year. But, he emphasized, that’s only if the legislation makes it to Gov. Little’s desk and is signed into law.
“We can be up and running within a month or less,” Scuri said. “We’re going to go as fast as you possibly can.”
This story was originally published March 24, 2026 at 4:22 PM.
