(Courtesy: The San Francisco Chronicle)
Nothing Congress does over the next few months—including action of ‘environmental programs, scientific research and Welfare — will have greater impact on local communities and individual Americans than passive of the proposed cuts to the healthcare entitlements, Medicare and Medicaid. The proposed reduction, totaling some $452 billion over seven years, may have life-or-death consequences for millions of people and will directly affect the financial condition and healthcare institutions of every local government in the United States.
With so much at stake the Medicaid cut, alone, is more than 15 times as great as any prior reduction one would expect an open and prolonged debate, hopefully leading to a bipartisan consensus on how much needs to be cut to save the system, how cuts should be implemented to minimize the pain ‘and how to bring cost efficiencies to healthcare delivery, Instead, the congressional majority, having pegged the level of heal care savings to help finance a partisan tax cut, proposes to rush through debate on the modalities of this complex process in less time and with less public attention than is normally devoted to foreign aid to Timbuktu. A detailed, statewide analysis of the impacts of the proposed health cuts, on a county by county basis, by Health Access a coalition of policy and educational groups provides a glimpse of why Congress is so reluctant to discuss the particulars of its plan. In short, California alone stands to lose more than $44 billion in federal healthcare funds over the next seven years, directly affecting almost 10 million people. Who are these 10 million Californians? How will they be affected? How will
The impact on them be felt by no beneficiaries? The answers are far from complete, but the Health Access analysis at least begins to confront the questions. It notes, for example, that fully 51 percent of the mare than 6 million beneficiaries of Medical, the state version of Medicaid, are poor children, I San Francisco, alone, those children number more than 71,000 (ant another 118,000 in Alameda County). If the state maintains its 50 percent matching: formula for Medical, the impact would be twice as great. In Los Angeles County, as many as 189,000 poor children could lose their Medical cover age. Statewide, millions could be added to the 6 million residents who already lack medical insurance, putting an impossible strain on county health budgets.
If Congress wants to cut the federal healthcare entitlement in the name of the American people, then the people have a right to know the facts before the decisive vote, not after.
Article extracted from this publication >>September 8, 1995
