Los Angeles Times
February 18, 2004
Budget Signals Narrowed Ambitions
By Peter Nicholas and Virginia Ellis
For decades, California distinguished itself by pioneering easy and inexpensive access to college and championing broad medical coverage and a generous financial lifeline for the poorest families.
Now, driven by financial necessity, political leaders are redefining California’s government, positioning it as a follower instead of a leader.
Even as California’s finances were strained by the dot-com collapse, former
Gov. Gray Davis plowed resources into the subsidized health insurance program for poor children, Healthy Families (California’s SCHIP program). Enrollment rose from about 100,000 to 700,000.
Donna Arduin, Schwarzenegger’s finance director, questioned the sincerity of
recent officials who had approved such largess. With no steady source of money for the expansion, the state was not so much preserving a progressive legacy as indulging a policy whim, Arduin suggested.
“If the policymakers that preceded our being here had a long-term plan for those programs, the argument would be much stronger that these were the priorities of the state,” Arduin said in an interview. “I don’t see that long-term funds were planned and made available to keep these expansions going.”
In navigating the financial crisis – preserving essential services while wiping out the state’s deficit – California may yet prove to be a model for the rest of the country, she added.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-budget18feb18,1,1991364.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Comment: The only truly significant advance in health care reform in the past decade was the federal enactment of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Intensive enrollment efforts within the states were effective in providing health care coverage for low income, uninsured children. Although the total numbers of individuals without insurance continued to increase, the numbers would be even greater without this program.
There was bipartisan consensus that this program was worthy of tax support, and that the long term plan was to continue to fund it through tax revenues. A separate issue in California is that one-third of the members of either the Assembly or the Senate can prevent approval of the state budget. As we are seeing on the federal level as well, this partisan element is forcing us into nearly intolerable debt in order to prevent modest taxation of significant private revenue sources.
Donna Arduin, who slashed Gov. Jeb Bush’s budget, is now swinging the cleaver in California. She, with Gov. Schwarzenegger’s blessing, considers tax supported health insurance for low income children to be “indulging in a policy whim.” Is this really the change that Californians voted for? Excuse me; I’m nauseated.
Don