The Special Session: A Call to Action

An Editorial

Governor Gregoire has called the Legislature into a Special Session starting November 28. Her goal: To make up for declining revenues with an additional $2 billion in cuts from state programs. The Legislature has already carved a cruel $10 billion from health care, education and other essential services in the past three years. We cannot hold still for even more drastic cuts.

In the next weeks, every PSARA member will be needed in this struggle that will shape our future as a state. You will be asked to call and write your legislators/ To testify about the impact on your life of specific cuts. If possible, to come to Olympia with thousands of others to create a human wall of protest. With our allies from the labor movement and the community, we must make it clear to our legislators that business as usual is a thing of the past.

Plainly, the life-and-death need of the hour is substantial new revenue.
And hidden in hundreds of special-interest tax exemptions, the needed revenue is there to be tapped. The Washington State Budget and Policy Center has identified these tax breaks. They drain $6.5 billion in revenue annually, year after year. They are never examined to see whether they fulfill a useful purpose.

The alternative to new revenue is unthinkable. The governor’s approach, to look for $2 billion in additional cuts, will lay waste to programs that meet fundamental human needs.

The proposals currently on the table would wipe out long term care services for more than 17,000 people, a 29 percent cut from the current case- load. Here’s who would lose the services they depend upon, as reported in the Senior Scene for October:

• 11,700 who would lose homecare assistance
• 1,000 now living in Adult Family Homes
• 2,700 living in assisted living facilities
• 1,000 living in boarding homes
• 450 living in nursing homes

And that’s just one aspect of the reductions in human services, that impacting long-term care. Other proposals include the elimination of the Basic Health Plan, the Disability Lifeline, interpretive services, health care coverage for immigrant children, maternity support services, adult pharmacy benefits – and the list goes on.

In the budget adopted in the 2011 session, funding for long term care was cut by $98.1 million, translating into a 10 percent reduction in personal care hours per patient per month. Many in long term care need assistance around the clock and have nowhere else to turn. No one, least of all elderly men and women, should have to worry about being deprived of the care they need.

In the current economy, the state’s modest safety net programs are needed more than ever. Families and communities are struggling to get by. Unemployment is rampant, people are losing health insurance, homes are heavily mortgaged or are being foreclosed.

Confronted with these multiple challenges, an all-cuts budget is simply indefensible. It shifts the burden of the budget deficit still more oppressively onto the backs of the most vulnerable.

The Legislature must hear from the people.