California Health Report | HealthyCal - Part 62
 

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Budget plans spares health, welfare programs from deep cuts governor proposed

Published: October 6, 2010 | No Comments

By Daniel Weintraub

The state budget package laid out by legislative leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger scales back the most drastic cuts to health and social service programs the governor proposed earlier this year.

Schwarzenegger’s proposal to eliminate the CalWorks welfare-to-work program and most of the state’s subsidized child care do not appear in the final agreement. His plan to eliminate community mental health programs and adult day care were also dropped from the final deal.

And Schwarzenegger’s proposal to eliminate services to many of the elderly and disabled people who get –in-home care to help with their daily living was drastically pared back.

The budget also includes money to restore cuts Schwarzenegger made last year to the Office of AIDS and child welfare services.

Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, dropped their proposals for an oil severance tax, stepped up sales tax enforcement, and the repeal or suspension of corporate tax breaks adopted as part of earlier budgets.

Instead, legislative leaders and the governor are banking on state revenues coming in higher than Schwarzenegger estimated earlier, more federal funds than the governor anticipated in May, and a variety of fund shifts and gimmicks, including the deferral into the next budget year of more than $1 billion in payments due the public schools.

The budget plan also includes $1.1 billion in planned cuts to state prisons, most from planned savings in inmate medical care, and $1.5 billion in reductions to state payrolls costs, which Schwarzenegger is expected to negotiate with the public employee labor unions.

We will be posting more details here as they become available.

 

Foster kids won’t get same benefits as other young adults through health reform

Published: October 6, 2010 | Comments (2)

By Megan Baier
HealthyCal.org correspondent

Parents across the country can put their 20-something kids back on their private health insurance thanks to health reform laws that rolled out last month But thousands of young adults will not have that opportunity: foster children who were raised in the care and custody of the state.

Senator Elaine Alquist, D-San Jose, sponsored SB 771, a bill that would have given foster children the ability to continue to receive health insurance through Medicaid until age 26.

In 2014 federal health reform laws will allow foster youth to stay on Medicaid until age 26. Senator Alquist’s bill aimed to go a step further and enact the law in California early, but it was held up over costs. Although Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation to extend many foster care benefits to youth between the ages of 18 and 21, older former foster kids will still be going without health care.

Sierra Jones grew up in foster care. She recently turned 21 and lost her Medi-Cal benefits. Jones says that now her health care options are limited, and she has to make out of pocket payments at the clinic she can go to.

Jones is pursuing higher education and cannot keep a full time job that would offer health insurance, while other private insurance options are too expensive, leaving her without any coverage.

“If I get sick then I’m just going to have to deal with it,” she said. Even if she needed medical care, she said she would not go to the clinic because of the cost. “It just makes it so much harder now.”

Thousands of young adults who were formerly in foster care are in the same situation as Jones and will not have the same opportunity as children with parents until health reform extends Medicaid in 2014.

Kelly Hardy, associate director of health for Children Now, works in collaboration with the Children’s Defense Fund and the Children’s Partnership on a campaign to win health insurance for all California children.

Hardy calls the state’s refusal to extend Medicaid benefits for foster children “short-term thinking.”

“Unfortunately I think policy makers are just looking at any way to avoid costs, but really you can either pay now or pay later,” Hardy said. “If young adults are not getting the health care that they need, they’re not going to be as productive and healthy later in life.”

“The state is legally the guardian for foster youth and so it’s only fair and equitable for all young adults up to age twenty-six to be able to stay on their guardian’s health insurance plan” Hardy said. “We really need to make sure the most disadvantaged youths are getting all the support that the most advantaged kids are getting.”

According to Senator Alquist, there are about 75,000 children in foster care, but few stay for long periods of time. Typically youth enter the state’s custody in poor health and often have a history of abuse or neglect.

The bill would have extended health insurance to 5,000-10,000 former foster kids between the ages of 21 to 26, costing the state anywhere from $25 million to $50 million a year.

 

Court backs governor’s use of line-item veto

Published: October 4, 2010 | No Comments

By Daniel Weintraub

The California Supreme Court decided two cases today involving the governor’s budget powers. We analyzed the court’s decision in the furloughs case here.

Probably of more long-lasting importance was the court’s unanimous decision in a case involving the governor’s line-item veto authority. That case arose out of the governor’s action last year in which he reduced appropriations in a legislative bill that itself was reducing spending levels in an already-adopted budget.

The governor’s vetoes cut nearly half a billion dollars from health and social service programs, including an AIDS program, the Healthy Families insurance program, assistance for the aging and developmentally disabled, and in-home care for the aged and disabled.

Lawmakers and supporters of the programs the governor cut cried foul, and sued. They argued that because the Legislature was not appropriating new money but was instead reducing an existing appropriation, the governor had no right to use his line-item veto to selectively reduce those appropriations even further. Allowing this, they argued, gave the governor “two bites” at the apple, once when the budget was approved and sent to his desk, and again when the Legislature used a separate bill to reduce some of the spending levels approved earlier.

The court emphatically disagreed. It ruled that there was no difference between the governor reducing spending in a budget bill or other simple spending bill, and doing so in a bill that was meant to reduce, rather than increase, spending.

The Legislature’s Democratic leaders, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and Assembly Speaker John Perez, reacted angrily to the court ruling, saying that it would upset the constitutional balance of powers by giving the governor too much power. The decision, Steinberg said, “will only worsen our already broken budget system.

The ruling might or might not worsen the state’s budget system, but it definitely cements the governor’s power to reduce spending in any spending bill the Legislature sends him. Ironically, the ruling might make lawmakers more reluctant to re-open a budget when a deficit is looming, because to do so would now allow a governor to make deeper cuts than the Legislature might be willing to enact on its own.

 

State furloughs are legal, this time, high court rules

Published: October 4, 2010 | No Comments

By Daniel Weintraub

The bottom line in the public employee unions’ case against the governor over furloughs is that the governor won, the unions lost. The furloughs are legal and state employees will get no back pay for the days they were forced to stay home from work, the state Supreme Court has ruled.

But the court’s opinion in the case is more complicated than that. The justices ruled that the governor has no inherent emergency powers to unilaterally furlough state employees. And even though unilateral layoffs are legal, furloughs are not, the court ruled.

The only reason these furloughs were allowed is that the Legislature passed a rather vague statute as part of the budget deal in 2009 that allowed the governor to take action to save a certain amount of payroll costs — the same amount he said his furlough order would save. And while the law itself did not mention furloughs, a bill analysis did, and the court found that in the debate over the legislation, everyone knew they were talking about furloughs.

Oddly enough, the court found that when the Legislature gave the governor the power to reduce payroll costs using “existing administrative authority,” the governor did not actually possess the authority to order furloughs. So that power was not part of his “existing authority.” But since he had assumed the authority to order furloughs, and lawmakers appeared to believe he had the power to order furloughs, the court ruled that the law they passed was meant to ratify his self-granted furlough authority.

So these furloughs are legal. But the next governor, if he or she wants to do something similar, will have to get approval first from the Legislature and/or the unions.

Here is a link to the full opinion in the case.

 

Schwarzenegger vetoes health reform bills

Published: September 29, 2010 | Comments (2)

By Daniel Weintraub

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bushel of bills Wednesday that Democrats sent him to implement and expand on the health reform passed by Congress and President Obama earlier this year.

Although Schwarzenegger has worked with the Legislature to put in place the first pieces of the health reform, he vetoed these bills because, he said, they were either premature or unnecessary.

The bills Schwarzenegger rejected would have forced insurers to provide mental health benefits on par with physical health benefits, limited rate increases to once a year, limited the ability of insurance companies to rescind policies when consumers seek benefits, and allowed county health systems to venture into the broader marketplace now controlled by private insurance companies.

In most cases Schwarzenegger’s veto messages said the issues addressed by these bills would either be addressed by Congress as part of health reform or by state regulators under laws already in place.

On another health care bill Schwarzenegger vetoed, the governor complained that lawmakers were over-reaching by trying to require health insurance companies and health plans to give more notice to brokers, buyers and ultimately consumers about the possibility of costs increasing.

“This bill is one more attempt to solve an extremely complex problem through over-regulation,
micromanagement and the placement of unnecessary requirements in the contracting process – all
without actually solving the underlying issue,” the governor said of AB 1759.

“Health coverage is expensive,” Schwarzenegger added. “It’s getting more expensive every day. Requiring sophisticated buyers, brokers and health plans to statutorily notify each other that costs may increase
throughout the year is similar to advising them that the sun is going to rise in the east.”

The other bills Schwarzenegger vetoed:

AB 1600, mental health parity
AB 2402, limiting rate increases
SB 56, public health options
AB 2540, increase fines for improper rescinding of consumer’s coverage

 

New scorecard ranks counties by childrens well being

Published: September 29, 2010 | No Comments

A new online scorecard ranks California’s 58 counties on 26 measures of children’s wellbeing.

The scorecard, produced by the advocacy group Children Now, ranks the counties using the latest data on health, education and other benchmarks. Users can search by county and see all 26 measures or search by one of the benchmark and see how the counties compare when grouped by population density and income.

The scorecard also shows trends and indicates which direction a county is moving on the scale. For many of the measures, ethnic breakdowns are also available.

For example, a check on the percentage of “children who are in a healthy weight zone” shows that Placer, Nevada and Marin counties rank highest, with 80 percent of their children in a healthy weight zone. Colusa and Imperial counties ranked lowest, at 61 percent. The presentation also shows a general relationship between healthy childrens weight and income, with the low-income counties having more overweight children.

To see this example, click here.

To see the full scorecard, go here.

 

Election preview: Proposition 19 would legalize, tax marijuana

Published: September 27, 2010 | 1 Comment

Note: This is one in a series of brief analyses of the propositions on the November ballot.

Proposition 19

What it would do

Legalize possession for personal use of small amounts of marijuana, and allow the state and local governments to allow, regulate and tax the cultivation, distribution and sale of marijuana.

Details

This measure would legalize marijuana under California law, although possession and distribution of pot would remain illegal under federal law. Just as it did after California legalized medical marijuana in the 1990s, the federal government could and probably would continue to enforce the federal prohibition on the possession and distribution of pot.

Currently in California, penalties for marijuana crimes vary from misdemeanor for possession of less than one ounce to a felony, with state prison possible, for selling the drug. Under Proposition 19, Californians age 21 and older could possess and share up to one ounce of marijuana and cultivate up to 25 square feet of the crop on private property.

Businesses, with supervision by local regulators, could grow and sell marijuana to people age 21 and older. The measure would require commercial marijuana operations to pay all the same taxes that other businesses now pay, and would allow local government to impose special taxes on the marijuana business. Although federal enforcement would likely keep such businesses in check for at least a while, it is possible that California could start a trend in the nation leading to the end of marijuana prohibition, and if that happened, taxes on pot sales could generate millions of dollars for local governments.

According to the nonpartisan legislative analyst, legalizing marijuana could also generate savings of “tens of millions of dollars” in law enforcement, jail and court costs.

Who is for and against it

Proposition 19 is getting financial support mostly from individuals and institutions who want to see marijuana legalized. It’s biggest benefactor is Oakland-based Oaksterdam University, which trains people in marijuana cultivation and has been a major supporter of the state’s medical marijuana laws. Opposition to the measure has been funded by a coalition of law enforcement, Native American and alcohol industry groups and businesses.

Bottom line:

Vote yes on Proposition 19 if you think marijuana possession and use should be legal for people age 21 and older, and the marijuana business should be legalized, regulated and taxed under state law and to the extent permitted by the federal government.

Vote no on Proposition 19 if you think marijuana should remain illegal in California except when used for medical purposes.

 

What would you eat on $4.50 per day?

Published: September 24, 2010 | No Comments

Pam Marino, who blogs at Good Neighbor Stories, has taken up a challenge to eat on $4.50 a day for a week, the amount that people on the program formerly known as food stamps receive. She admits to being pretty hungry for a couple of days, but managed to fill up at the end of Day 2 on some home-cooked rice and beans and a salad. Follow her progress here.

 
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