Posted by JM Ashby
Republicans nationwide should take note. A recall campaign has begun for Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona because of her reckless cuts to, you guessed it - social programs!
Brewer decided that the best way to close the state's budget gaps is to simultaneously cut Medicaid, cut education, and dish out tax cuts for corporations. Sound familiar? It should, because Republican governors, legislatures, representatives, and senators nationwide are seeking to do the exact same thing. Arizona is currently facing the deepest cuts to Medicaid, with Governor Jan Brewer proposing to throw as many as one in five people off the state's Medicaid program.
Nowhere has the national Medicaid crisis come under a harsher glare than in Arizona, where Brewer, 66, drew international condemnation for being the only governor to stop paying for certain organ transplants, including hearts and livers. Cutting Medicaid for about one in five Arizonans now on the rolls, as she proposes, would help save $541.5 million in the coming year.‘Pushing the Cost’“It’s not like the care will stop,” said Vernon Smith, a health-policy consultant in Lansing, Michigan, and former director of that state’s Medicaid program. “The state is essentially pushing the cost burden of this population onto the public hospitals.”That prospect may cost Banner Health System, Arizona’s largest health-care provider and second-largest private employer, which wrote off $80.2 million in charity care in 2009, according to company filings. Charity would balloon to “hundreds of millions” of dollars a year if Brewer’s plan is adopted, said Bill Byron, a spokesman for closely held Banner. [...]In Arizona, where 13 of Banner’s 23 hospitals are located, about one-fourth of its patients are covered by Medicaid, Byron said. Brewer’s cuts may force the company to fire staff, reduce service and negotiate “far, far higher rates for private insurers,” Byron said.
Brewer's draconian budget cuts are going to harm businesses as well as average citizens who depend on Medicaid just to survive, so the people of Arizona are responding by starting a recall campaign for Jan Brewer. The organizers of the recall campaign aren't all Democrats either.
Matt Jette, who recently became a registered Democrat, has been named the spokesman for the Committee to Recall Arizona Governor Jan Brewer.The group is trying to collect thousands of signatures statewide by May 28 to force a recall election.A Chandler woman, who is a Republican, launched the grassroots effort in January.The group says the state is headed in the wrong direction and it disagrees with the Governor's cuts to health care and education.
Given the popularity of social programs such as Medicaid, I would normally encourage Republicans to continue attacking them, but the consequences if they should actually succeed in decapitating them will be too severe for that kind of sentiment.Still waiting to see which state will be the first to attempt altering the law to declare bankruptcy rather than raise taxes.