okay, mike, the following is directly from senator
chamlis's letter to me on this subject: after it i'll
make a coment.

States cannot use deficit spending and are facing
fiscal pressures from Medicaid.  Since the Medicaid
program is jointly funded, policy changes can occur at
either the federal and/or the state level.  The
President's fiscal year 2006 proposed budget
request provides more than $193 billion for Medicaid,
which is an increase of

approximately 6% over fiscal year 2005 levels.

Should any legislation come before the Senate that
addresses this very important issue, I will certainly
keep your views in mind.

as you see, medicade was not cut (or slahed as the
article put it). there was a 6% increase. now let me
explain a few things commonly done by politicians and
the news media. a increase is described as a cut if
that is crease is less than the describer had
proposed. lets say the democrats proposed a 10 percent
increase and the republicans propsed a 4 % increase
and they compromised and came up with 6 % increase.
the democrate then goes out and says medicaid or
whatever got cut or slashed 4 %. i think this is
basically dishonest. it was not cut it was increased.
you may agree that the full 10 % was needed or not,
but, it is dishonest to call an increase a cut. so i
am calling Marta Russell A LIER. this article is
intellectally dishonest.
this does not mean that i would not have supported
more increase, it just means that i am calling the
writer a lier for being dishonest.
  i hope you all appreciate me contacting my senator
and that you recognize that the truth is important.


--- Mike Collis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but, Ken, I
> hope you never get to be on
> Medicaid.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask]
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
> Of Justice For All Moderator
> Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2005 10:00 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Marta Russell -- The Medicaid Kill Off
>
> Marta Russell -- The Medicaid Kill Off
>
> ZNet Commentary
> The Medicaid Kill Off September 04, 2005
> By Marta Russell
>
> Bush and the Congress slashed $10 billion from the
> Medicaid budget for this
> coming year. Medicaid is the primary public health
> care program for
> impoverished persons that serves over 53 million
> people.
>
> The cut is clearly an attack on poor people and it
> may wind up killing
> disabled and chronically ill persons before all is
> done. It is also a strike
> from those segments in our society who wish to
> dismantle the entire Medicaid
> system and there are undercurrents that will force a
> rollback of disabled
> people's civil rights.
>
> Even before this $10 billion slicing goes into
> effect, governors and state
> legislatures in states such as Mississippi,
> Missouri, Minnesota, and
> Tennessee are cutting back on Medicaid to reduce
> costs. Maneuvers include
> restricting eligibility, paring down the rolls by
> kicking people off the
> program entirely, eliminating or reducing "optional"
> benefits such as
> prescription drugs, wheelchairs, diabetic testing
> supplies, rehabilitation
> services, even oxygen, initiating co-payments for
> services including drugs,
> and reducing payments to doctors and hospitals.
>
> Privatization or subcontracting oversight of
> programs is also being promoted
> in several states, such as Florida, though there is
> no reason to believe
> this will reduce costs, rather it is an ideological
> shift to the right -
> more "free market" healthcare. Placing private
> corporations in the middle
> between citizens and government mostly adds more
> overhead. Then, of course,
> those corporations' goal is to make profits taking
> dollars from going
> straight to patient care.
>
> In the middle of all this are disabled people
> fighting for their right to
> live in the community. As I write, significantly
> disabled protesters in
> Tennessee have occupied the Republican governor's
> office at the Capitol for
> over 3 weeks to stop cuts to their state Medicaid
> program (known as
> Tenncare). Gov. Phil Bredesen has responded by
> saying: No Food or Water.
>
> Gashing Medicaid promises to roll back the clock on
> disabled persons who
> nearly always were locked up, warehoused, with no
> option to live in the
> community before direct (in-home) support services
> became a part of some
> states' Medicaid program. Present rollbacks to
> Medicaid are undermining
> disabled people's civil rights - the right to be
> free of institutionalized
> "care" (see E.W. and L.C. v Olmstead Supreme Court
> decision outlining the
> right for services to be delivered in the "least
> restrictive" setting).
>
> Tactics like denying medications and treatments
> force disabled persons into
> nursing homes to get services they must have to
> survive. Nursing homes have
> proved to be costlier than in home services. Why
> this fact is not a part of
> every state's Medicaid budget discussion is a grave
> oversight - but then we
> know the nursing home lobby spends tens of thousands
> to protect its turf.
>
> In many cases being placed in a nursing home is no
> less than a death
> sentence. Some members of ADAPT will tell you they'd
> rather die than go into
> a nursing home. They know - first hand - what goes
> on in them.
>
> The governors say their budgets can no longer
> sustain the growing Medicaid
> program. Rising Medicaid costs are often attributed
> to the economic
> downturn. In part this is correct because as people
> lose their jobs they
> generally lose their healthcare and this increases
> the need for Medicaid. As
> more people lose their jobs (and cannot afford Cobra
> premiums - their
> healthcare) they flock to Medicaid.
>
> There are other factors. Employers such as Wal-Mart,
> the largest and most
> profitable retailer in the U.S., does not provide
> healthcare for most of its
> employees. Instead the corporation sends workers to
> the local Medicaid
> office to apply for public healthcare.
>
> Private insurers have increased their premiums to
> unaffordable levels for
> middle and low-income people forcing them to turn to
> Medicaid when they can.
> Yet another reason is that prescription drugs have
> increased in price by
> double digits over the past years driving up
> Medicaid costs all across the
> nation.
>
> Not surprisingly, the Republican governors have
> struck the first blows
> against the most vulnerable sections of society.
> Gov. Haley Barbour of
> Mississippi and former chairman of the Republican
> National Committee, Gov.
> Matt Blunt of Missouri, Gov. Phil Bredesen of
> Tennessee, and Gov. Tim
> Pawlenty of Minnesota supported slashing this vital
> program rather than
> raise taxes or insist that President Bush provide
> more Medicaid dollars
> (federal government typically pays 57% of the
> program's overall costs) -
> which Bush could do if there was the political will.
> Perhaps a reminder is
> due here that Bush, while at Harvard Business
> School, said that he opposed
> Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. It is no
> fluke that we see this
> attack on Medicaid now.
>
> It is optional whether to cover some disabled
> persons or not under Medicaid
> rules - a pure piece of bad welfare state planning
> if ever there was one.
> The people who are covered unconditionally are
> children, pregnant women, and
> blind people. Gov. Haley Barbour's effort in
> Mississippi to reclassify
> 65,000 Medicaid recipients as ineligible
> "poverty-level aged and disabled"
> was stopped in court last year. But new restrictions
> on medications have
> been enacted in Mississippi that will limit the
> number of prescriptions a
> person on Medicaid receives to five beginning next
> year. Only two name-brand
> prescriptions are allowed. While saving the state
> money, the rule change is
> likely to seriously impact the lives of 80,000
> elderly, mobility impaired,
> deaf, blind, "mentally ill," diabetic, and
> cancer-ridden recipients. This
> type of rollback does not deal with the outrageous
> prices placed on
> medicines by drug manufacturers nor other kinds of
> healthcare inflation.
> Instead it forces cutbacks that are damaging to
> recipients' well being. In
> Missouri, Gov. Matt Blunt has scheduled 90,000
> Medicaid recipients to be
> severed from the state rolls next year. The cut was
> Blunt's solution to
> balancing the budget without increasing taxes,
> despite widespread public
> disapproval.
>
>  "The cuts we face sent a big refund back to the
> feds because they won't
> have to pay out matching funds for Medicaid," says
> one
=== message truncated ===





______________________________________________________
Click here to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.
http://store.yahoo.com/redcross-donate3/