[Mb-civic] The cruelest cuts - Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  The cruelest cuts

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  February 8, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

PRESIDENT BUSH said in his State of the Union address, ''we strive to be 
a compassionate, decent, hopeful society."

The next day, he and his fellow Republicans ambushed the poor.

The majority-Republican House last week narrowly passed $39 billion in 
budget cuts for Medicaid, Medicare, student loans, and child support. 
The Republican-majority Senate had already passed the cuts. Roy Blunt of 
Missouri, the former acting Republican House majority leader, declared, 
''Once again, House Republicans are on record as defending budget 
discipline. We have achieved $39 billion in savings, while streamlining 
government."

It was a cutthroat lie. Everyone knows the cuts are meant to fund $70 
billion in tax breaks for the rich. Bush repeated in the State of the 
Union that he wants to make the tax cuts permanent. As the government 
streamlines and disciplines the poor, hope springs eternal for 
entitlements for the rich.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated last week that the 
cuts in Medicaid would result in 13 million people paying higher prices 
for prescription drugs by 2010 and 20 million people by 2015. It 
estimated that federal cuts would force states to impose cost-sharing 
requirements for at least one nonprescription health service or raise 
them for 13 million people by 2015.

The CBO predicts that cuts at the federal level would force already 
strapped states to impose premiums on 900,000 Medicaid enrollees by 2010 
and 1.3 million by 2015. Similarly, 900,000 enrollees would see their 
benefits cut to take care of their teeth, eyes, and mental health.

The CBO estimates that higher healthcare premiums will result in 45,000 
enrollees -- more than can fit into Fenway Park -- losing coverage by 
2010. By 2015, the number would be 65,000 by 2015, equivalent to the 
number of privileged people who just packed Detroit's Ford Field for the 
Super Bowl.

The particularly vicious nature of the Medicaid cuts comes in three 
particular sentences in the CBO's report. On prescription drugs, it 
said, ''About one-third of those affected would be children and almost 
half would be individuals with income below the poverty level." On 
cost-sharing for nonprescription services, it said, ''half of those 
enrollees would be children."

On the people who would be driven out of coverage altogether, the report 
said, ''About 60 percent of those losing coverage would be children."

The cuts are a prescription for making the exploding crisis on 
healthcare much worse. When Bush ran for president in 2000, the nation's 
uninsured numbered 39.8 million. It rose to 45.8 million in 2004. Todd 
Gilmer and Richard Kronick, medical researchers at the University of 
California at San Diego, projected the number to increase to 56 million 
by 2013.

In June 2003, when the official number of uninsured was 41 million, the 
National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine published a major 
report that estimated that ''the diminished health and shorter life 
spans of Americans" who lack health insurance have cost the nation 
between $65 billion and $130 billion a year. The study estimated that 
the human toll of uninsurance amounts to 8 million people with chronic 
illnesses not getting full services and 18,000 people dying prematurely.

The nation is already at a state where, according to the Centers for 
Disease Control, uninsured children are 10 times more likely not to have 
a usual source of healthcare and three times more likely not to have 
seen a doctor of any kind in a calendar year. Of course, uninsured 
children are more likely than insured children to get their care in more 
expensive emergency rooms. This is hardly what we need in a nation where 
child obesity and diabetes are out of control.

No matter how much Congress tries to make the poor disappear, it still 
comes back to hit us even more profoundly in our wallets. The Institute 
of Medicine study noted that 600,000 to 700,000 people with severe 
mental illness are jailed each year, a ridiculously more expensive 
option than healthcare itself. A study by the health advocacy group 
Families USA found that unreimbursed care for the uninsured ultimately 
finds its way into our private premiums, to the average tune of $922 for 
families and $341 for individuals. By 2010, care for the uninsured could 
add an average of $1,502 and $532, respectively, to family and 
individual premiums.

Bush said that we strive for a compassionate society. But the Institute 
of Medicine report concluded, ''we cannot excuse the unfairness and 
insufficient compassion with which our society deploys its considerable 
healthcare resources and expertise." The rich get compassion and tax 
cuts. The poor get no compassion. They just get cut.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/08/the_cruelest_cuts/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060208/fe9c5507/attachment.htm