March 21, 2008
HATCHET JOB
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AIDS job training got Peña where she is today |
We know Senate Republicans want to find ways to trim the budget—but taking money away from poor disabled children whose parents have AIDS and from people living with HIV/AIDS who are trying to re-enter the work force isn't the way to do it. The Senate's one-house budget completely cuts $1.4 million in job training funds for people with AIDS and fails to provide money to restore "SSI invisibility," the cold-hearted Pataki-era policy that counts SSI disability benefits for children toward household income. Yet for all the cutting of help to poor people, the one-house budget still keeps in place handouts to big corporations in lieu of Medicaid reform.
Seven programs in New York State receive funding to provide job training for people living with HIV/AIDS, a funding stream that has existed since 2001. Julie Peña came to the Housing Works Job Program after stints in prison and a battle with drug addiction. Job training gave her the skills and confidence to go back college, and today she directs Housing Works' transitional housing program. Peña can't imagine what her life would have been like without state-funded job training. "There's more to life than sitting home and collecting benefits," she said. "Through the Job Training Program I saw all of the opportunities in front of me."
"I'm outraged that the Senate has gutted job-training for poor people with AIDS," said Charles King, president and CEO of Housing Works. "Unlike most diseases, there is a horrible stigma around AIDS that undermines the people living with the virus who don't believe they can work and that contributes to employment discrimination. Poor people with HIV/AIDS need all the help they can get to break into the workforce."
Taking money away from adults is one thing, but failing the state's poor, disabled children is quite another. Housing Works has 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, and to treat such benefits as "invisible" when calculating household budgets. Thanks to a Pataki policy of Orwellian proportions, however, SSI invisibility applies to everyone except the approximately 1,100 households that include people with AIDS and their children.
The Senate failed to follow the Assembly and executive's laudable lead and restore SSI invisiblity.
"It is unconscionable for the Senate to even contemplate denying these desperately needed benefits to families wrestling with AIDS, poverty—and to compound these hardships—disabled children," said Housing Works Senior Staff Attorney Armen Merjian. "Thousands of New Yorkers will suffer immensely if the Senate version prevails, ostensibly in the name of saving a trivial amount of money in the budget."
Housing Works will be in Albany for several days next week to remind legislators of the importance of job-training and introduce them to real people who have benefited from the program—and to find out how they can justify balancing their budget on the backs of poor, disabled children.
Senate tries to hold up Medicaid reformNo one's going to get everything they want in this gloomy budget year, but it's reprehensible that Senate Republicans and the Democratic Chair of the Senate Committee on Social Services, Children and Families, Carl Kruger, would cut two programs with minimal financial implications and maximum benefit, while lining the pockets of pharmaceutical companies and corporations.
The executive and Assembly budgets take a real stab at Medicaid reform, which was supported by State Health Commissioner Richard Daines at a press conference on Tuesday. The reforms would restructure hospital rates based on real costs, not prior payment structures, that, according to the Health Department, would save $600 million a year and increase funding for outpatient services where the poor are more likely to receive services.
The Senate denies reforms, in the words of its one-house budget, "to a hospital reimbursement system that has been in place for more than 25 years" as though that fact justifies the status quo. The Senate budget also restores $25 million in State funds for "trend factor" increases for nursing homes, which the executive and Assembly budget cut back. Hundreds of community-based health care providers get no regular trend factor. The Senate budget proposal also reinstates much of the health care cost containment measures that would take money out of the pockets of pharmaceutical companies .
The good news is that Albany isn't in session until next Wednesday, so there's still time to influence the decision makers. Keep reading the Update to follow the progress of this year's budget and how it affects people with HIV/AIDS.