HHS Commissioner Provides "Sobering Numbers" to North Country

The scenery in the North Country is beautiful, but the picture painted by health and human services commissioner Nicholas Toumpas was not pretty.

Almost 130 people from various social-service and healthcare groups attended the meeting last week

The bad news came, as it sometimes does, in a PowerPoint presentation.

Toumpas described the graphs and charts he showed as having “rather sobering numbers.”

They looked at Northern Grafton, Coos and Carroll Counties. They showed the roughly 106,000 people living there have been hit hard by problems such as the collapse of the paper industry.

And those numbers showed North Country residents are worse off than the state as a whole.

Martha McLeod is the executive director of the North Country Health Consortium.

“I think what we saw today in the data is that the North Country population is a population in higher need of services, health and human services.”

Toumpas says his agency has yet to complete studies of the situation of every region in the state.

But after seeing the North County data he said he suspects the region has the greatest need.

“That was an eye-opener for me when we went through this.”

Toumpas says one problem is that HHS, like other agencies, has had its budget cut.

“Now the question that comes up is when we go forward in an era of limited means how do we deal with the issues of The North Country.”

But in addition to delivering the bad news, Toumpas said something that surprised and pleased some North-Country healthcare officials.

He said it doesn’t make sense to divide available state funds based on population alone.

The North Country may have only about 8 percent of the state’s population.

But it needs more than 8 percent of the available funds.

That’s an argument some North-County healthcare advocates have been making for a long time.

Toumpas also said his agency – as well as other organizations – must be looking at new ways to deliver services.

“We’ve got to look at things in a different way. I can’t do the same old, same old. That is really the most significant challenge is to say ‘How do we question the status quo in terms of how we have always done things? And, again, that is the difficult part for many people that are sitting here.”

Martha McLeod with the North Country Health Consortium agrees.

She says the lack of funds will require organizations to innovate.

“I think there is a whole range of options and they are all really on the table at this time for us to talk about, and see what would work, focusing all the time on the clients that need to get those services, really.”

To some, however, the obvious question is this:

How quickly can those agencies and the state respond in an area where many people need help now?

For NHPR News this is Chris Jensen