But what did Pennsylvanians do wrong? Why is health
insurance more important for residents of the Bay State than the Keystone State
based solely on the person at the helm? Last summer would 89,000 children in
Pennsylvania have gotten cut from Medicaid if Mitt Romney were the governor of
our Commonwealth?
But if comprehensive health care is a state issue as Mr.
Romney insists, let’s look at what Dr. Corbett has prescribed for Pennsylvania.
Stage 1: Eliminate
Affordable Health Care for working Pennsylvanians
Despite a campaign promising
“developing a world-class work force” (evidently by decimating education
funding),
“promoting state parks and forests” (to multinational drillers, perhaps), and
“improving our transportation infrastructure,” (seriously this is all on his
campaign website!), Tom Corbett believed the first
issue warranting his attention as governor was eliminating
health coverage for over 40,000 working Pennsylvanians
who were contributing to the cost of their insurance. (Not to mention extinguishing
the hopes of the ½ million people on the plan’s waiting list).
Regardless of whether Gov. Corbett even had the authority
to eliminate adultBasic, he had the ability, and that was
just phase one in his Corbett (doesn’t) Care plan.
Stage
2: Cut 89,000 Children from Medicaid
According to Tom Corbett: it’s time to cut the fraud,
waste and abuse that is crushing our state -- yep time to cut those freeloaders
who are abusing Pennsylvania’s public programs -- all 89,000
of those kids living in poverty.
From August 2011 to January 2012, Corbett
and his deputies directed the removal of 130,000 people from the Medicaid rolls.
That’s a fairly atrocious number that sparked the attention of the feds which
actually provide the guidance and jointly-fund Medicaid. Compounding the federal
government’s insistence that the Corbett administration should revisit the
rolls were the 89,000
kids who were cut. As of late May, the DPW
Secretary still hasn’t accounted for where all the children who were cut
disappeared to and why they no longer qualify.
Stage
3: Cut access to nutritious food
How can we really ensure health care costs go up for
low income Pennsylvanians (which really means costs increase for all of us)? I
suppose a cheaper option than distributing packs of cigarettes to people on
street corners, is to jeopardize their access to nutritious food.
As if cutting or even holding budget line items like
Farmer’s Market Coupons steady in a time of increased public need weren’t
harmful enough, Gov. Corbett not to be outdone, decided to
make access to food stamps more burdensome. The kicker is that by
implementing an asset test, as the governor prescribed, actually costs the
state (otherwise known as the taxpayers) more money. This plan, which took effect in May, punishes
people for collecting a modest savings that could help make ends meet in emergencies.
You know – like every financial advisor would recommend.
In order to qualify for SNAP (food stamps) residents
were already means tested, which means they could only earn 160% of the federal poverty
level, about $35K a year for a family of four. The
asset plan piles on the workload of the already task-saturated county
assistance offices, which by the way have also seen the edge of the budget ax
in recent years.
Stage
4: Collect a 5% income tax from the families with disabled kids
Candidate Corbett claimed to want to support Pennsylvanians with autism,
however he approved a plan by a top deputy to implement a policy change to
collect up to 5% of a family’s gross household income in the form of
co-payments for medically necessary treatments for their disabled kids.
The policy was announced under the radar
and bypassed formal review by the legislature and the
Independent Regulatory Review Commission. Due to public outcry the plan
is on hold for now, but when they tried to implement it,
DPW in several cases didn’t even calculate a family’s income correctly,
sometimes overestimating it by $100,000.
After considering just his first 22 months in office Corbett’s
Health care plan doesn’t look promising for many of us. One Romney strategy Tom
Corbett has adopted is tax breaks and less oversight for big business, now if
he’d only embrace his approach to securing the health of residents of this
Commonwealth ….
