Tears, Fear in Response to Disabled Cuts
Lindsay is a girl with cerebral palsy from Yuba City. Everything in her life has been a struggle, she said — from learning how to read to learning how to behave. But she did it. Made it through school, and now she has a job. But at yesterday’s budget subcommittee hearing, she testified that all of her successes will disappear if the planned budget cuts go through to disabled programs in California.
“If you pass these budget cuts, I will be institutionalized,” she said in her strong, halting voice. “I have only been able to succeed because my mom always fought for me. And if she were still alive, she would have been here in these hallways at 7 a.m., to fight for me.”
As it was, there were hundreds of people crammed into the hallway outside the hearing room, and the line to testify before the Senate subcommittee was impossibly long.
Maternity Mandate Bill Has Familiar Ring to It
According to the California Health Benefits Review Program, nine health-related mandate bills have been introduced as new legislation in this legislative session. They are undergoing analysis before they’re heard in committee.
Some of that analysis is going to be a bit repetitive. Many of those bills have already been heard, and some of them were passed in the Legislature last year.
For instance, SB 155 by Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa), which would mandate coverage of maternity care, has pretty much identical language and intent to last session’s AB 1825. That bill, which had been authored by former Assembly member Hector De La Torre, D-South Gate, was passed by the Legislature, and then vetoed by former Governor Schwarzenegger.
Health Services Making Shift to Counties
Compared to the past two weeks of painful deliberations in budget subcommittee hearings, yesterday’s discussion of the proposed shift of health services to the counties was like a breath of realigned air.
“In a normal year, we wouldn’t contemplate a hundred percent takeover [of some health services] in counties,” Kelly Brooks of the California State Association of Counties said. “But this isn’t a normal year, so we’re willing to consider taking on probably more than we would.”
Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget proposal shifts responsibility and funding to the counties for foster care, adult protective services, mental health programs and drug and alcohol treatment programs..
How CalWORKS Cuts Hit Beneficiaries
The litanies of budget cuts have droned on throughout the past two weeks of subcommittee hearings. In a recent hearing over a proposed $1.5 billion in cuts to CalWORKS, the state’s welfare-to-work program, things got a little more real.
It started with a finance department statistic that nine other states have imposed similar restrictions to the newly proposed 48-month time limit for benefits to adults and their children on CalWORKS. (That limit would end cash aid to about 5,500 families in California, and move up the clock for hundreds of thousands of others.)
“Well, other states spend less than us on education, too,” Assembly member Wesley Chesbro (D-Santa Rosa) said. “That’s not necessarily a model we want to strive for.”
In legislative terms, the last two weeks of subcommittee hearings were “lightning quick,” as Jean Ross of the California Budget Project put it.
The Senate and Assembly subcommittees for Health and Human Services listened to presentations and comment on sweeping changes to social service programs. Any one of those changes would normally go through a lengthy review process, but lengthy is a luxury in a budget that needs to be approved by March, just seven weeks after it was proposed.
This week, those subcommittees are expected to wrap up the business of reviewing roughly $12 billion in cuts, about half of that coming from health-related services and programs.
Filling Out the Powerful Exchange Board
The board of the Health Benefit Exchange is going to be small and mighty.
It will be responsible for implementing the first, and probably largest, health insurance exchange in the nation. This exchange will concentrate the health insurance buying power of millions of Californians, and will be the central force in implementing national health care reform in California.
It will be run by five people. Three of the board’s members are in place. Former Governor Schwarzenegger named two of them: his chief of staff Susan Kennedy, and the former Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kim Belshé. The third member, by statute, is the current head of CHHS, Diana Dooley, appointed CHHS secretary two months ago by Governor Brown.
State Budget Plan Is ‘Ugly Beyond Belief’
The annual conference of the Insure the Uninsured Project (“From Reform to Reality: Building Better Systems of Care in California”) was supposed to focus on Medi-Cal expansion, the rollout of the health benefits exchange and how to get insurance coverage for the 6 million Californians who go without it.
But it was pretty hard to ignore the $12 billion in cuts to state programs proposed by Governor Brown — with roughly half of those cuts impacting health services.
The national rancor over the attempt to repeal health care reform slipped into the statewide conference. Orange County is about to announce that it will not be part of the California Health Benefit Exchange.
Seniors Making Noise Over Budget Cuts
They hit Sacramento in force this week, hundreds of seniors and the disabled, milling in front of the Capitol Building with walkers and wheelchairs, chanting about what they want (senior health services) and when they want it (now!).
But most of the political rhetoric in Sacramento has focused on the grim reality of the $25.4 billion deficit and the need to make cuts that no one wants to make.
That includes many health services, from establishing Medi-Cal co-pays and putting a hard cap on the number of provider visits allowed, to eliminating the Adult Day Health Services program and scaling back In-Home Supportive Services. Those latter cutbacks, along with reducing cash benefits from Supplemental Security Income, have incensed and worried seniors, who see a dire future without those services.
Dooley Reacts to Brown’s Speech, Florida Ruling
It has been three weeks since Governor Jerry Brown first floated his ideas for trimming a $25.4 billion deficit, which included roughly $6 billion in cuts to health-related services.
Since then, legislators have listened to hundreds of Californians objecting to those cuts in budget hearings. Diana Dooley has sat in on hearings, talked with the subcommittees and spent a lot of time with legislators and staff to kick around all of the cuts and their possible alternatives.
“I could come up with eight or 10 programs that are [candidates for amending cuts],” Dooley said after Brown’s State of the State speech last night, “but it’s premature to say where there might be modifications.”
How California Progress Fits With Federal Report
A new federal report on lowering health insurance costs has a distinctive California flavor to it.
One of the main points of the report from the Health and Human Services agency is to quantify the savings to families and individuals who participate in a health benefits exchange. Since California is the first in the nation to establish a post-health-reform exchange, this state is a bit of a poster child for how the health reform law will work.
Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones joined national health secretary Kathleen Sebelius in a conference call on Friday to discuss the new federal report.