Latest news with #UniversityofNewMexicoHospital
Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
‘He's a fighter': Family describes Bloomfield officer fighting for life after traffic stop shooting
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – A New Mexico police officer is still fighting for his life after getting shot during a traffic stop in Bloomfield. Bloomfield police Officer Timothy Ontiveros was transported from San Juan County Tuesday afternoon to University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque. Many of Timothy Ontiveros's family members have come from out of town to support him in the hospital. Story continues below Entertainment: First-of-its-kind indoor pickleball facility coming to northeast Albuquerque Community: Albuquerque church leaning on faith after 2 members killed by their son Environment: What should New Mexicans do if they come across a raccoon? KRQE News 13 spoke with his sister, who described him as a fighter. 'He'd give you the shirt off his back. He would help anybody on the road. He saw someone on the side of the road, he's going to stop, whether it's money, food, shoes. That's the kind of kid Timothy is,' said Sierra Sanchez, sister of Officer Ontiveros. She is in town from Texas, as her little brother fights for his life. Ontiveros has been undergoing surgeries at UNMH after getting shot in the neck and shoulder. 'He's bullheaded. He will fight. I promise you, he'll fight to the very end because that's who he's always been,' said Sanchez. Bloomfield police department said on Monday night, Officer Ontiveros pulled over 58-year-old Dennis Armenta, who then shot him. Another officer at the scene shot and killed that driver. 'I know if it was me in that hospital and him out here, he'd be strong for me. So, I've got to be strong for him,' said Sanchez. Ontiveros is originally from Texas and moved to New Mexico, where he now lives with his two daughters, 17 and four years old. 'He would move heaven and earth for those two little girls,' said Sanchez. Ontiveros works as a volunteer firefighter in Aztec and was a police officer in Farmington before getting a job with Bloomfield PD, where he's worked for the last six months. His family said he takes great pride in working for law enforcement. 'He was doing what he loved. Like, I don't know if he would have it any other way. Like he was protecting and serving, and that's all we could ask for him,' said Sanchez. Ontiveros has undergone multiple surgeries and is stable but in critical condition. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Yahoo
Mother charged with death of her toddler in Albuquerque set to have competency hearing
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – A woman charged with the child abuse death of her daughter is expected in court Thursday for a competency hearing. Now, we are seeing the moments that followed her arrival at the hospital with her three-year-old, who was pronounced dead. Story continues below New Mexico Insiders: Leader Of Albuquerque FBI Steps Down Trending: Family of 105-year-old Bataan Death March survivor shares his story Crime: New Mexico correctional officer caught by husband for bringing drugs to inmate, court docs show Community: Poll: Where is the best place to go camping in New Mexico? Kerri Santos arrived at the University of New Mexico Hospital in the early morning in January 2024, claiming she had driven across the country to escape an abusive situation in Massachusetts. She had been traveling with her three young children, her adult son Austin Bing, and Christina Pena-Cantor. Santos stated that her three-year-old daughter had not been feeling well, and they had stopped at a gas station for her to use the bathroom. According to Santos, the child had fallen off the toilet. When they arrived at the hospital, doctors told police that the child was already dead. Officers began to question Santos's account after doctors observed several bruises on the child's body that were in various stages of healing. There were also signs that the child had been tied up. After interviewing Santos's other child, it was revealed that all three of her children had been sexually abused. Since the toddler's death, four people have been arrested: Santos, Bing, Pena-Cantor, and James Welch, the man they were staying with in Albuquerque shortly before the death. On Thursday, Santos is scheduled to appear before a judge for a competency hearing to determine if she is fit to stand trial. KRQE News 13 reached out to the New Mexico Children, Youth, and Families Department to ask about Santos's two other children and whether they remain in their care. They informed us that, while they cannot disclose case specifics, the children are safe. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Yahoo
Did county officials enable Ryan Martinez's violent actions at a 2023 protest in Española?
Ryan Martinez, the gunman who severely wounded a Native American man at an Española protest against the proposed installation of a controversial Juan de Oñate statute in 2023, is serving the first year of a four-year prison sentence. Now, survivors of that shooting are suing the county officials who they say turned a blind eye to the circumstances that enabled Martinez's violent outburst. Jacob Johns, a 41-year-old Hopi and Akimel O'odham man from Spokane, Washington, who was shot by Martinez during the demonstration, and Malaya Corrine Peixinho, a 23-year-old New Mexican woman who Martinez flashed his gun at, filed lawsuits on Monday against the Rio Arriba County commissioners, the sheriff's office and the county manager. They allege that their civil rights were violated on Sept. 28, 2023, by county officials and sheriff's deputies who knew there was a threat of violence that day, yet were seen 'leaving the demonstration, disregarding the danger and failing to protect protestors.' Jacob Johns outside the Roundhouse in Santa Fe on May 12. Nadav Soroker/Searchlight New Mexico The shooting happened during a peaceful protest over the county's proposal to install a statue of Oñate, which had been in storage for years, at the county complex in Española. Community backlash was so strong that the county temporarily postponed the installation. On the morning of the canceled event, protestors flocked to the complex to celebrate. They held an Indigenous prayer ceremony and repurposed the concrete slab, fashioning the base for the statue into an altar decorated with handmade artifacts like corn and squash, woven baskets and pottery. 'Respectfully, I am in full support of your decision to put the statue back up, but strongly do not believe it is appropriate or safe to have the statue placed or relocated in front of the County Annex as scheduled,' then-Sheriff Billy Mayfield wrote two days before the scheduled reinstallation. 'By choosing to relocate the Don Juan de Oñate statue, you must look at all the possibilities of the unsafe environment it can create.' Johns saw Martinez, who arrived in a white Tesla and was wearing a red Make America Great Again cap, shouting racial epithets at the Native demonstrators and pacing back and forth. Just before noon, Martinez charged the crowd; Johns hurried to step in front of him and block Martinez's path to the children and elders at the demonstration. Martinez reached into his waistband, pulled out a gun and promptly shot Johns in the chest with a hollow-point bullet, the lawsuit says. 'There were no sheriff's deputies present immediately before and when Martinez shot Johns and pointed his gun at Peixinho,' the suit alleges. He bled on the ground outside the county complex for 10 minutes before emergency personnel arrived. After receiving treatment in Española, he was airlifted to the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque. According to his lawsuit, he briefly died during this trip. In the suit, Johns says he saw a council of spirits who asked him to give a full account of the times in his life when he chose to help other people rather than to look out for himself. Even though his shooter is behind bars, he said, he, Peixinho and their attorney see these lawsuits as a way to hold accountable the public officials tasked with keeping Española safe on that September morning. 'I would like to see the police do their job,' Johns told Searchlight New Mexico. 'I was lying there, bleeding out in their parking lot for 10 minutes, and it wasn't even the sheriff's office that apprehended the shooter — it was tribal police.' Before the shooting, a warning Two days before the demonstration, on Sept. 26, 2023, then-Sheriff Billy Merrifield — who died in April of this year — emailed county commissioners to voice his concerns over the planned relocation and installation of the Oñate statue. It had been taken down from its site in remote Alcalde in 2020, when the nation was grappling with whether to tear down, preserve or otherwise alter statues and memorials that represented controversial figures and movements in American history. Oñate is infamous for his role in the 1599 Acoma Massacre, in which Spanish soldiers under his command killed hundreds of Native people. Men 25 and older who survived had their right foot amputated, according to historical accounts, and were sentenced to slavery. In the 1990s, the right foot of Oñate's statue was cut off by a group that called itself the Friends of Acoma. In the summer of 2020, county workers removed the Oñate sculpture from its perch in Alcalde. Courtesy of Eddie Moore/Albuquerque Journal Commissioners planned to install the statue — which depicts the conquistador riding on horseback, sword and scabbard at his side — at a new location: the county complex in Española. Such a move, Merrifield warned, could likely end with 'deadly force, which can turn into legal liability/tort claims for the county.' The late Billy Merrifield, Rio Arriba County's sheriff at the time of the shooting. Courtesy of Rio Arriba County 'Respectfully, I am in full support of your decision to put the statue back up, but strongly do not believe it is appropriate or safe to have the statue placed or relocated in front of the County Annex as scheduled,' he wrote. 'By choosing to relocate the Don Juan de Oñate statue, you must look at all the possibilities of the unsafe environment it can create.' Johns' and Peixinho's cases hinge on what the county chose to do with that warning. Their suits say that sheriff's deputies encountered an agitated, cursing Martinez that morning, describing him as 'darting back and forth' and 'acting in an obviously agitated and extremely anxious manner.' 'Due to Martinez's disruptive, antagonistic and provocative behavior, Deputy (Steve) Binns informed Martinez that he needed to leave the scene,' the lawsuit says. According to the suits, an unnamed undersheriff 'then overruled Deputy Binns and told Martinez that he could stay.' Finally, the lawsuit alleges, deputies left the scene. The absence of any armed law enforcement at this gathering is made worse by two things, they argue: the fact that county officials were warned by the sheriff of the day's potential violence, and that the Rio Arriba County Sheriff's Office building is just a couple of dozen paces from where Johns was shot. 'They were deliberately indifferent,' Mariel Nanasi, their lawyer, told Searchlight. Nanasi is a former Chicago civil rights attorney who now leads New Energy Economy, a Santa Fe–based renewable-energy advocacy group. If either case makes it to trial, the lawsuits have the potential to test the limits of the relatively young New Mexico Civil Rights Act, which was drafted after George Floyd's murder and signed into law in 2021. The legislation did away with qualified immunity as a defense for government officials in New Mexico. In the years since it became law, a number of prominent cases have been filed that relied on the act. Alec Baldwin alleged civil rights violations in a January lawsuit against the First Judicial District Attorney, residents of southern New Mexico alleged violations against the Camino Real Regional Utility Authority and a University of New Mexico basketball player alleged violations after a teammate allegedly punched him. None of those cases have gone to trial. Unlike federal civil rights law, the state act has a cap of $2 million in damages. Alex Naranjo, the former chair of the Rio Arriba County Commission. Courtesy of Rio Arriba County Commission In the aftermath of the shooting, then-county commission chair Alex Naranjo — whose uncle, former state senator and local political mainstay Emilio Naranjo, played a pivotal role in securing funding for the Oñate statue back in the 1990s — said the statue wouldn't go up. Within weeks of the shooting, residents of the area sought to initiate a recall against Naranjo. When he challenged it, a judge found that there was probable cause that Naranjo violated the state Open Meetings Act by deciding to relocate and install the Oñate statue outside of the bounds of a public meeting. He has appealed to the New Mexico Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in December and has yet to issue a decision. None of the county officials named in Johns and Peixinho's lawsuit would comment Tuesday morning. A long road to recovery Since the shooting, both Johns and Peixinho have faced difficult recoveries. Johns was hospitalized for more than a month and underwent numerous surgeries. Martinez's bullet pierced his abdomen, destroyed his spleen, broke his ribs and collapsed his lungs. Johns said it also damaged his pancreas, liver and stomach. Even after he was sent home to Washington, he carried wound drainage tubes — in his pancreas and liver — for six months. Johns created a visual diary that detailed his medical recovery. The nearly six-minute video captures the raw vulnerability of what it's like to heal from a gunshot wound. It captures the moment Martinez shot him and graphically shows the months of hospitalization and surgeries that followed. At one point, stray bullet fragments are visibly pushing their way out of his body, through his skin. Following one surgery, Johns is stapled up — only to later learn that his body is allergic to the staples. A video diary of Jacob Johns' long recovery from his gunshot wounds. Courtesy of Jacob Johns. Warning: This video contains graphic footage. 'Every laugh, every cough, every movement I could feel the internal tubes touching my internal organs in the most painful, horrible place I could ever imagine being,' he says in the video. After half a year of recovery, he says, he began the long, hard 'internal journey toward healing.' Peixinho knows this journey well. She was just 22 when she saw Johns knocked to the ground and then looked up to see Martinez's pistol aimed at her head. For months after, she said, loud noises triggered her. If she was in a drive-thru, she would recline her car seat and lie down to make sure a stray bullet couldn't find her. If she heard a gunshot outside her house, or a firework, or a car backfiring, the fear came back. 'There were times when I was at work and I'd hear a gunshot,' she recalled. 'I'd crawl into the trunk of my car and I'd be stuck there for hours, so mortified.' Both Johns and Peixinho said there's little solace in the knowledge that the gunman was put away. At the last minute before trial, Martinez accepted a plea deal that put him in prison for four years. Prosecutors dropped a hate crime enhancement that they had previously sought. 'Every single time I look down, I have these massive scars and these big holes in me,' Johns said. 'But it's the psychological stuff that's really been messing with me … I had to agree that my life was only worth four years.' To both survivors, the outcome was a painful reminder of the violence facing Indigenous people. Just three years before Martinez shot Johns and leveled his gun at Peixinho, a man protesting an Oñate statue in Albuquerque was shot in the back four times by an assailant armed with a .40-caliber handgun. Both Johns and Peixinho know that there's no relitigating Martinez's case. But they see their lawsuits as a step toward accountability. 'When law enforcement fails to do their job, it really puts society in danger,' Johns said. 'We really have to have faith that we're going to be protected when we're exercising our constitutional rights. A condensed version of this story is available here. Malaya Corrine Peixinho and Jacob Johns in Santa Fe. (Photo courtesy of Mariel Nanasi) Ryan Martinez, the gunman who severely wounded a Native American man at an Española protest against the proposed installation of a controversial Juan de Oñate statute in 2023, is serving the first year of a four-year prison sentence. Now, survivors of that shooting are suing the county officials who they say turned a blind eye to the circumstances that enabled Martinez's violent outburst. Jacob Johns, a 41-year-old Hopi and Akimel O'odham man from Spokane, Washington, who was shot by Martinez during the demonstration, and Malaya Corrine Peixinho, a 23-year-old New Mexican woman who Martinez flashed his gun at, filed lawsuits on Monday against the Rio Arriba County commissioners, the sheriff's office and the county manager. They allege that their civil rights were violated on Sept. 28, 2023, by county officials and sheriff's deputies who knew there was a threat of violence that day, yet were seen 'leaving the demonstration, disregarding the danger and failing to protect protestors.' The shooting happened during a peaceful protest over the county's proposal to install a statue of Oñate, which had been in storage for years, at the county complex in Española. Community backlash was so strong that the county temporarily postponed the installation. On the morning of the canceled event, protestors flocked to the complex to celebrate. They held an Indigenous prayer ceremony and repurposed the concrete slab, fashioning the base for the statue into an altar decorated with handmade artifacts like corn and squash, woven baskets and pottery. 'Respectfully, I am in full support of your decision to put the statue back up, but strongly do not believe it is appropriate or safe to have the statue placed or relocated in front of the County Annex as scheduled,' then-Sheriff Billy Mayfield wrote two days before the scheduled reinstallation. 'By choosing to relocate the Don Juan de Oñate statue, you must look at all the possibilities of the unsafe environment it can create.' Johns saw Martinez, who arrived in a white Tesla and was wearing a red Make America Great Again cap, shouting racial epithets at the Native demonstrators and pacing back and forth. Just before noon, Martinez charged the crowd; Johns hurried to step in front of him and block Martinez's path to the children and elders at the demonstration. Martinez reached into his waistband, pulled out a gun and promptly shot Johns in the chest with a hollow-point bullet, the lawsuit says. 'There were no sheriff's deputies present immediately before and when Martinez shot Johns and pointed his gun at Peixinho,' the suit alleges. He bled on the ground outside the county complex for 10 minutes before emergency personnel arrived. After receiving treatment in Española, he was airlifted to the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque. According to his lawsuit, he briefly died during this trip. In the suit, Johns says he saw a council of spirits who asked him to give a full account of the times in his life when he chose to help other people rather than to look out for himself. Even though his shooter is behind bars, he said, he, Peixinho and their attorney see these lawsuits as a way to hold accountable the public officials tasked with keeping Española safe on that September morning. 'I would like to see the police do their job,' Johns told Searchlight New Mexico. 'I was lying there, bleeding out in their parking lot for 10 minutes, and it wasn't even the sheriff's office that apprehended the shooter — it was tribal police.' Two days before the demonstration, on Sept. 26, 2023, then-Sheriff Billy Merrifield — who died in April of this year — emailed county commissioners to voice his concerns over the planned relocation and installation of the Oñate statue. It had been taken down from its site in remote Alcalde in 2020, when the nation was grappling with whether to tear down, preserve or otherwise alter statues and memorials that represented controversial figures and movements in American history. Oñate is infamous for his role in the 1599 Acoma Massacre, in which Spanish soldiers under his command killed hundreds of Native people. Men 25 and older who survived had their right foot amputated, according to historical accounts, and were sentenced to slavery. In the 1990s, the right foot of Oñate's statue was cut off by a group that called itself the Friends of Acoma. Commissioners planned to install the statue — which depicts the conquistador riding on horseback, sword and scabbard at his side — at a new location: the county complex in Española. Such a move, Merrifield warned, could likely end with 'deadly force, which can turn into legal liability/tort claims for the county.' 'Respectfully, I am in full support of your decision to put the statue back up, but strongly do not believe it is appropriate or safe to have the statue placed or relocated in front of the County Annex as scheduled,' he wrote. 'By choosing to relocate the Don Juan de Oñate statue, you must look at all the possibilities of the unsafe environment it can create.' Johns' and Peixinho's cases hinge on what the county chose to do with that warning. Their suits say that sheriff's deputies encountered an agitated, cursing Martinez that morning, describing him as 'darting back and forth' and 'acting in an obviously agitated and extremely anxious manner.' 'Due to Martinez's disruptive, antagonistic and provocative behavior, Deputy (Steve) Binns informed Martinez that he needed to leave the scene,' the lawsuit says. According to the suits, an unnamed undersheriff 'then overruled Deputy Binns and told Martinez that he could stay.' Finally, the lawsuit alleges, deputies left the scene. The absence of any armed law enforcement at this gathering is made worse by two things, they argue: the fact that county officials were warned by the sheriff of the day's potential violence, and that the Rio Arriba County Sheriff's Office building is just a couple of dozen paces from where Johns was shot. 'They were deliberately indifferent,' Mariel Nanasi, their lawyer, told Searchlight. Nanasi is a former Chicago civil rights attorney who now leads New Energy Economy, a Santa Fe–based renewable-energy advocacy group. If either case makes it to trial, the lawsuits have the potential to test the limits of the relatively young New Mexico Civil Rights Act, which was drafted after George Floyd's murder and signed into law in 2021. The legislation did away with qualified immunity as a defense for government officials in New Mexico. In the years since it became law, a number of prominent cases have been filed that relied on the act. Alec Baldwin alleged civil rights violations in a January lawsuit against the First Judicial District Attorney, residents of southern New Mexico alleged violations against the Camino Real Regional Utility Authority and a University of New Mexico basketball player alleged violations after a teammate allegedly punched him. None of those cases have gone to trial. Unlike federal civil rights law, the state act has a cap of $2 million in damages. In the aftermath of the shooting, then-county commission chair Alex Naranjo — whose uncle, former state senator and local political mainstay Emilio Naranjo, played a pivotal role in securing funding for the Oñate statue back in the 1990s — said the statue wouldn't go up. Within weeks of the shooting, residents of the area sought to initiate a recall against Naranjo. When he challenged it, a judge found that there was probable cause that Naranjo violated the state Open Meetings Act by deciding to relocate and install the Oñate statue outside of the bounds of a public meeting. He has appealed to the New Mexico Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in December and has yet to issue a decision. None of the county officials named in Johns and Peixinho's lawsuit would comment Tuesday morning. Since the shooting, both Johns and Peixinho have faced difficult recoveries. Johns was hospitalized for more than a month and underwent numerous surgeries. Martinez's bullet pierced his abdomen, destroyed his spleen, broke his ribs and collapsed his lungs. Johns said it also damaged his pancreas, liver and stomach. Even after he was sent home to Washington, he carried wound drainage tubes — in his pancreas and liver — for six months. Johns created a visual diary that detailed his medical recovery. The nearly six-minute video captures the raw vulnerability of what it's like to heal from a gunshot wound. It captures the moment Martinez shot him and graphically shows the months of hospitalization and surgeries that followed. At one point, stray bullet fragments are visibly pushing their way out of his body, through his skin. Following one surgery, Johns is stapled up — only to later learn that his body is allergic to the staples. 'Every laugh, every cough, every movement I could feel the internal tubes touching my internal organs in the most painful, horrible place I could ever imagine being,' he says in the video. After half a year of recovery, he says, he began the long, hard 'internal journey toward healing.' Peixinho knows this journey well. She was just 22 when she saw Johns knocked to the ground and then looked up to see Martinez's pistol aimed at her head. For months after, she said, loud noises triggered her. If she was in a drive-thru, she would recline her car seat and lie down to make sure a stray bullet couldn't find her. If she heard a gunshot outside her house, or a firework, or a car backfiring, the fear came back. 'There were times when I was at work and I'd hear a gunshot,' she recalled. 'I'd crawl into the trunk of my car and I'd be stuck there for hours, so mortified.' Both Johns and Peixinho said there's little solace in the knowledge that the gunman was put away. At the last minute before trial, Martinez accepted a plea deal that put him in prison for four years. Prosecutors dropped a hate crime enhancement that they had previously sought. 'Every single time I look down, I have these massive scars and these big holes in me,' Johns said. 'But it's the psychological stuff that's really been messing with me … I had to agree that my life was only worth four years.' To both survivors, the outcome was a painful reminder of the violence facing Indigenous people. Just three years before Martinez shot Johns and leveled his gun at Peixinho, a man protesting an Oñate statue in Albuquerque was shot in the back four times by an assailant armed with a .40-caliber handgun. Both Johns and Peixinho know that there's no relitigating Martinez's case. But they see their lawsuits as a step toward accountability. 'When law enforcement fails to do their job, it really puts society in danger,' Johns said. 'We really have to have faith that we're going to be protected when we're exercising our constitutional rights. A condensed version of this story is available here. This article first appeared on Searchlight New Mexico and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
UNMH collecting donations to lessen the impact of child abuse in the community
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – University of New Mexico Hospital is collecting donations to help with the impact of child abuse in Albuquerque. The hospital will be accepting clothes, books, and comfort items for kids in the community on Wednesday in honor of Child Abuse Prevention Day. New Mexico health experts warn against buying kids baby ducks or chicks for Easter Visitors can learn more about child maltreatment, risk factors, and intervention techniques. The event is set for Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Pavilion Plaza. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Mother, health providers, lawmakers sound alarm over proposed Medicaid cuts
U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez was flanked by health care workers and constituents during a news conference at El Centro Family Health on Feb. 28, 2025. (Photo by Austin Fisher / Source NM) Vanessa Herrera saw the first sign of a problem with her son Alex when he was one years old. She was changing him and noticed a large bump and bruise on his chest. Alex's grandmother had been watching him and, when Herrera asked what had happened, she said he hadn't fallen or gotten hurt. They took Alex to the hospital near their home in Arroyo Seco, a small town in Taos County in Northern New Mexico. When medical workers tried to draw blood from his arm, it swelled. The next day, they went to the Taos Clinic For Children & Youth, where the doctor, who has hemophilia herself, recognized Alex's condition. She sent them to the University of New Mexico Hospital two-and-a-half hours south in Albuquerque, where they were able to test Alex's blood and confirm the rare bleeding disorder that prevents the blood from clotting and can be life-threatening. Herrera, a single working mother of three, shared how Medicaid cuts would affect her son and other families at a Friday news conference hosted at another clinic in Northern New Mexico and organized by U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a Democrat for the largely Northern New Mexico 3rd Congressional District where Herrera resides. Medicaid is the jointly run state-federal health insurance program for the very poor. Approximately 47% of El Centro's patients receive their health insurance through Medicaid, Leger Fernández said. New Mexico overall has the highest proportion of residents on Medicaid of any state in the U.S., with 34.3% of its citizens enrolled in the program, according to the non-partisan health policy research organization KFF. GOP tax cut plans may depend on savings from Medicaid. What is it and who relies on it? The U.S. House GOP's budget resolution, which President Donald Trump has endorsed, calls for the federal House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees the Medicaid and Medicare health programs, to find at least $880 billion in cost savings to aid Republicans in paying for other parts of the bill. 'What Republicans are doing is they're gutting these programs, they're taking programs away from people, all so that they can give tax breaks to the most wealthy in the country,' U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said at the news conference. 'This is going to be the tax scam from President Trump 2.0.' Leger Fernández said she wants Donald Trump and her Republican colleagues in Congress to see the pain they would cause if they go through with their proposed cuts. 'This is not a Republican or a Democrat issue,' Leger Fernández said. 'It is an issue of keeping our population safe and doing it in an incredibly cost effective manner.' Herrera noted that losing Medicaid would also affect millions of other disabled children in the U.S. She said she hopes sharing her story will prevent the cuts, 'to help our children and our seniors.' SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE Earlier on Friday, Leger Fernández toured El Centro Family Health, which would be devastated by any Medicaid cuts, according to its Clinical Director Dr. Leslie Hayes. The health center has been running for half a century and is located in a Rio Arriba County building overlooking the city of Española. Hayes, who has worked at the clinic for 30 years, introduced Leger Fernández to the physicians, nurses and staff who care for patients and coordinate their care elsewhere. Hayes said without Medicaid, New Mexico's working poor would not get health insurance, and when people don't get the treatment they need, they die of preventable causes. Her clinic provides treatment for people who would otherwise not be seen for diabetes, opioid use disorder and prenatal care. 'We are the last resort for a lot of our communities,' Hayes said. 'When I hear about them wanting to cut some of this stuff — you're not going to save money doing this.' For example, insurance companies decided they would cover opioid use disorder because patients who go untreated will cost more in emergency room visits for overdoses, abcesses and other complications, she said. El Centro runs 24 clinics across 22,000 square miles in Northern New Mexico, including medical and dental clinics and school-based health centers, said El Centro CEO Darren DeYapp. If Medicaid cuts become reality, some of those clinics may have to reduce their working hours, or even close, 'then there's no going back,' DeYapp said. 'Medicaid covers the most vulnerable population so the chances of people seeking care are pretty much null and void,' he said. Lovelace Health System Chief Medical Officer Dr. Vesta Sandoval said cuts to Medicaid would have 'devastating' effects on New Mexico's entire health care system, including routine primary care and vaccinations. She said in the state's more rural areas, 50% of children are on Medicaid. New Mexico's maternal mortality rate is already too high and cutting Medicaid would make it even worse. 'If they start making these cuts you can expect people are going to be unable to get into hospitals, unable to see primary care physicians, unable to have OB physicians taking care of them, and we're going to see increased damage to New Mexico patients, because Medicaid protects our system, it stabilizes our system, and it protects our patients,' Sandoval said. New Mexico's urban hospitals are already over capacity, Sandoval added, and cuts to Medicaid could mean that smaller clinics would have to reduce services or working hours, and hospitals in rural areas would have to close. As for Herrera's son, Alex is now 6 years old, and the medication he takes has changed his life and his mother's, she said. Medicaid has also helped cover the cost of traveling to and from Albuquerque, she said. Every week for the past five years, Herrera has administered a clotting factor called Idelvion through a port in Alex's upper chest. Each dose costs more than $13,000, translating to an annual cost of more than $753,000, according to the nonprofit Institute for Clinical and Economic Review. 'Without Medicaid, we would not have been able to afford it,' she said. 'We are scared to lose it, because I don't want to lose my son. I couldn't imagine losing him.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
