Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2009. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
San Francisco Chronicle - May 30, 2009
Erin Allday
The governor's budget would slash $1.4 billion from state health services, including $227 million announced Friday. The single biggest cut would be nearly $700 million from the state's Medi-Cal program for the poor. The proposal also calls for eliminating the state's Healthy Families program - saving $322 million - and the adult day care program, saving $153 million. Mental health services and programs for low-income immigrants also would be cut. Nearly $60 million would be cut from programs that help AIDS patients pay for medication and provide HIV counseling, testing and epidemiological studies.
What it means to you
Benefits for Medi-Cal recipients would be cut and payments to doctors likely would go down, making it more difficult for Medi-Cal patients to find doctors. Killing the Healthy Families program could leave 225,000 children without health insurance. Some legal immigrants would lose benefits for anything other than emergency care, and all but the neediest elderly and disabled residents would lose in-home care services.
Reaction
"We are in terrible times, and when you're in terrible times, you go back to the basics," said Nancy Berlin, director of the California Partnership, a coalition of community organizations fighting poverty. "The basics to me are taking care of the most vulnerable - families, children, disabled, the elderly - and those are exactly the people we're going to harm if we make these cuts. I just don't see how a humane society can let that happen."
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