Gov. Frank Murkowski has signed legislation that could keep about 1,300 children and pregnant women from receiving free health care over the next year, at a savings to the state of about $1.75 million.

The bill changes the income level at which families qualify for Denali KidCare, which provides health care for children and pregnant women in families that make too much money to receive traditional welfare but generally don't have health insurance through their jobs. It's paid for with federal and state funding.

There are a variety of DPA flyers, forms, notices and presentations available in PDF format in Russian, Lao, and Spanish.

Click "read more" for a list of the materials available:

Greetings everyone,
The Alaska Legislature has gone home for another year and DPA received relatively little budgetary impact from lawmakers. Because most of our programs are federally funded and those federal funds require a certain percentage of state dollars to match, the majority of lawmakers declined to tinker with our budget.

The bigger news today concerns our ongoing reorganization. Late last week, your executive managers met and finalized a new, expanded management group for DPA. The purpose of that group is to bring more leaders from more sections to the decisionmaking table. We hope that doing so will result in more creative ideas, better problem solving and better information flow from the frontline staff to the managers and vice versa.

A new Kaiser report studies the influence of TANF on women's health and well-being. Women comprise 90% of the adult caseload receiving welfare assistance through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. TANF

The Department of Health and Social Services is terminating all current Alternate Workweek agreements and requiring new agreements if employees wish to continue working an alternate workweek. This is the official notification all employees currently on an alternate workweek agreement that their agreement will end on June 29, 2003.