January 18, 2008
WIN A FEW
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Big budget will include some good news |
New York Governor Eliot Spitzer will unveil his FY08-09 executive budget proposal Tuesday morning in Albany, and it will include several important "wins" for New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS, including restoration of SSI invisibility for low-income households receiving the AIDS rent enhancement.
"We are as delighted now as we were dejected by former Governor Pataki’s cruel decision to insert language denying invisibility to these families, even after they had established their rights to invisibility in the New York courts," said Armen Merjian, Senior Staff Attorney for Housing Works. "This is the culmination of more than a half-decade of struggle to restore invisibility—and thus full benefits—to the most needy of New York families, all of whom wrestle with poverty, AIDS, and other disabilities."
Merjian won several lawsuits in state court—including a landmark Court of Appeals ruling last summer—that established the principle that fair and appropriate welfare budgeting should allow low-income families to keep the value of federal SSI disability benefits for their children.
But former Governor George Pataki, in his last year in office, muscled language into state law that took the benefits back. Spitzer’s move will restore over $573 per month to over 1100 families—who really need the money! The new provision will take effect after passage of the budget (around April 1 in recent years) and will cost about $7 million per year in state funds.
Spitzer won't be moving forward with previously-rumored plans to mandate managed care for Medicaid beneficiaries living with HIV/AIDS. Instead, NYSDOH officials have planned for an extended discussion-and-deliberation process on the issue with advocates, service providers and AIDS Institute staff over the next several months.
The Spitzer executive budget will also include $1.4 million in state funding to pay for part of a rate increase for AIDS Adult Day Health Care programs that passed in that very same last Pataki budget in 2005.
Federal officials at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services have refused to approve the rate increase for over six months, apparently part of an effort to block all Medicaid funding increases for New York (at least 37 other programs have been similarly blocked). The rate increase will amount to about a $6 per day increase for AIDS ADHC providers, which serve over 1300 New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS and multiple co-morbid illnesses.
Other positive items to look for in the budget: Modest increases to programs that fight HIV in communities of color, prevent new HIV infections and increase access to sterile syringes.
Not in the budget: A $4 million/year rate increase for COBRA case management programs, sought by dozens of AIDS groups and led by Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
Action on COBRA, along with HASA for All and legislation to implement a 30-percent-of-income rent cap for AIDS housing, moves to the Legislature. And a strong, weekly grassroots advocacy, lobbying and organizing campaign is already in the works.
For a copy of the 2008 Housing Works state legislative agenda click here. And for more information on this year’s organizing and advocacy campaign contact Charles Long at long2@housingworks.org.