Health Insurance - An Unaccounted-for Workforce Cost
Spare Medicaid-Maintain Shared Revenue
Here in Wisconsin we have a Governor who chose to spare the state Medicaid program from budget cuts. In Delaware, the Governor cut Dungarvin's Medicaid funding by 6%; in Illinois, the Governor cut Dungarvin's Medicaid funding by more than 15%, forcing us to close our program there. We do have a "shared revenue" problem here in Wisconsin that needs to be worked out in the legislature, but I'd rather be dealing with that than with the Governor making cuts to the Medicaid program. CAPOW will be working with the Wisconsin County Human Services Departments to try to find a way to get the state to fund services at a level that will support quality.
It is ironic that community agencies are in this position of having to be grateful for 0% funding increases (no cuts). Forty years ago, most of the government spending for people with severe disabilities was for services provided directly by state and county employees. In the 1960s and early 70s, public employees, whether in state facilities, or in school districts around the state, learned that they had to be willing to take action to get the pay increases they needed. Sure, they were underpaid, but they found out that when they formed unions and went out on strike, they got what they wanted.
Later in 1970s and in the early 1980s, services for people with disabilities were privatized as state institutions were emptied out, and the Medicaid Waiver program began to expand. It was at this time that direct service employees lost their ability to strike or take other actions to increase their pay, as the state and counties were no longer employing most of them.
Now, community agencies, who provide the majority of the services, are on the front lines, acting on behalf of their workers, to make it clear that 0% increases in funding are not acceptable when our costs are increasing so dramatically.
