State Officials To Discuss Healthy Families Enrollment Freeze Tomorrow

July 29, 2009

State officials will meet in Sacramento tomorrow to get an update on the Healthy Families enrollment freeze, which took effect on July 17 and is preventing thousands of low-income children from accessing low-cost health coverage. Officials also will discuss alternative sources of funding that could help replace some or all of the $174 million in state funding that was cut from Healthy Families in the revised budget agreement that the Governor signed yesterday.

State officials have been negotiating with the First 5 California Children and Families Commission to see if First 5 could shift some of its tobacco-tax revenues to Healthy Families to fund health coverage for children age 5 and younger, which could keep thousands of kids off the waiting list. So far, First 5 officials have expressed a willingness to help, but have been reluctant to commit to a specific level of support.  First 5 officials may be ready to show their hand at tomorrow’s meeting.

– Scott Graves

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Governor’s Vetoes Target Health and Human Services

July 28, 2009

Californians who rely on health and human services programs received some more bad news this morning when Governor Schwarzenegger signed the revised 2009-10 Budget. The Governor used his line-item veto authority to cut nearly $500 million in General Fund spending from an already pared-down budget – with nearly $400 million of that cut (about 80 percent) coming out of health and human services programs.

Significant line-item vetoes include:

  • An $80 million cut to funding for the Child Welfare Services Program, which responds to reports of abuse and neglect.
  • An additional $50 million cut to funding for Regional Center services for children up to age 5 who have developmental disabilities. In his veto message, the Governor directs his staff “to immediately request” funding from the state First 5 California Children and Families Commission to backfill the General Fund reduction. First 5 uses tobacco tax revenues to fund programs for children age 0 to 5 throughout the state.
  • An additional $50 million cut to funding for the Healthy Families Program, which provides health coverage for low-income children and for which an enrollment freeze has already been implemented. Combined with cuts already approved by the Legislature, the Governor’s veto increases the total Healthy Families reduction to more than $170 million in 2009-10. The Governor suggests that the state First 5 Commission, foundations, and “other interested parties” could use their own funds to make up for this General Fund reduction.
  • An additional $37.6 million cut to funding for the In-Home Supportive Services Program, which helps seniors and people with disabilities live safely in their own homes.
  • Elimination of state funding for AIDS/HIV programs, community clinic programs, and a range of Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health programs.

CBP staffers are culling through the vetoes and will be posting additional analyses of the July 2009 budget agreement to our website in the coming hours and days.

– Scott Graves

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The End of an Era? Reversing Forty Years of Progress

July 23, 2009

Details of the budget agreement that will be voted on later today or possibly tomorrow began leaking out late Wednesday. Links to an analysis prepared by the Assembly Budget Committee and bill text made public – thank you – by the Senate Republican Caucus confirm that the devil is in the details and the details are worse than we’d previously been led to expect. In brief, the proposed agreement reverses four decades of progress across a range of policy areas, from social welfare to higher education and the environment. Some of the policy changes that stand out include:

  • Eliminating statutory cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) for CalWORKs and SSI/SSP grants and COLAs for the University of California and California State University systems. While these have often been suspended in tight budget years, the existence of the statutory provision provides a reminder that inflation erodes the purchasing power of grants and program allocations. It is worth remembering that the provision providing cash assistance COLAs for poor families that this agreement will repeal was signed into law by none other than Ronald Reagan during his time as California’s governor.
  • An end to a forty-year moratorium on new offshore oil drilling. The new lease is anticipated to raise $100 million. This amount stands in stark contrast to the nearly $1 billion that would be raised by the oil severance tax proposed earlier in budget negotiations and later abandoned.
  • Elimination of General Fund support for state-supported immunization programs. Remember this when the anticipated flu epidemic hits this fall. The $18 million in savings makes a measly contribution to the total $24 billion of budget “solutions” but could mean the difference between life, death, and much larger costs for treating diseases that didn’t need to happen.
  • Deep cuts in support for the Healthy Families and Medi-Cal programs that will, among other things, result in hundreds of thousands fewer Californians with health coverage. This will mean a further battering of the health care safety net at a time when an increasing number of Californians are looking to public programs for assistance due to the loss of a job and/or job-based health coverage.

The proposed borrowing from local governments will lead to a further squeeze on programs that assist vulnerable Californians, as counties attempt to cope with fewer state dollars for a host of programs, a loss of property tax dollars, and lower local revenues due to the economic downturn. That shoe will drop over the upcoming weeks.

I’ve always proudly advertised the fact that I was born and raised in California and educated by the state’s public schools from kindergarten through graduate school. Unfortunately, this budget agreement marks a rolling back of similar opportunities for the current and future generations of young Californians.

– Jean Ross

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A Budget Is About Choices. What Do These Choices Say About Us?

July 22, 2009

No doubt, these are difficult economic times, and crafting a deal to close the budget gap that has emerged since February is no small order, particularly when California’s legislators are hamstrung by a two-thirds vote requirement for passing a budget and any tax increase.

Yet despite these constraints and our recession-drained coffers, crafting a budget agreement still comes down to values and choices. And the deal reached by legislative leaders and the Governor on July 20, which the CBP analyzed in a document released yesterday  – no small task given the lack of any publicly available summary of the agreement – reveals some troubling priorities.

Policymakers proposed deep cuts to education, higher education, health coverage for children, and the safety net, even as they left untouched tax cuts for some of the biggest and most powerful corporations. These tax cuts, which I spoke about on Capital Public Radio’s Insight program yesterday, will cost the state upwards of $2.5 billion a year when fully implemented. What does $2.5 billion mean in terms of this budget deal? It’s more than the proposed 2008-09 cuts to public schools ($1.6 billion), more than the proposed cuts to health and human services programs (which exceed $2 billion), and almost as much as the cuts proposed to higher education ($3 billion.)

In short, when it came to choosing between benefits for the state’s largest and most powerful corporations, or education and healthcare for California’s children and youth, the corporations won.

This budget deal also points to another adage we have here at the CBP: Flawed processes lead to flawed results. In recent months, it has become more apparent than ever that California’s budget process is irrevocably broken. Californians need to end the two-thirds vote requirement for budget and tax increases, overhaul the initiative process, and bring our tax system into the 21st century, so that Californians can once and for all have budgets that truly reflect their priorities and values.

– Jean Ross

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More Than 600,000 Californians Would Lose Cash Aid Under Governor’s CalWORKs Proposals

July 17, 2009

New data from the Department of Social Services (DSS) show that the Governor’s most recent CalWORKs proposals – the ones he unveiled in June – would cause more than 600,000 children and adults in 250,000 families to lose cash assistance in 2011-12. That’s when the Governor proposes to implement significant changes that would severely restrict the amount of time low-income families could receive CalWORKs cash grants.

Here’s how the numbers stack up:

  • Number of families that would be dropped from CalWORKs: 250,000.
  • Number of children in those families who would lose cash assistance: 486,000.
  • Number of adults in those families who would lose cash assistance: 127,000.
  • Total number of children and adults in those families who would lose cash assistance: 613,000.

By comparison, the DSS estimates that about 586,700 families will receive CalWORKs cash assistance during 2009-10, the most recent year for which projections are available. As a result, the Governor’s proposals would cause more than four out of 10 CalWORKs families (43 percent) to lose basic subsistence grants as well as access to a range of services designed to move parents into the workforce.

– Scott Graves

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