A new voice to defend Public Health

By Nancy Amidei

When the City of Seattle or King County takes up the budget, the hearing room is sure to be crowded. Lining up at the microphones are people angry about paying taxes, about the state of their roads or sidewalks, or about some personal issue.

Thanks to the Seattle Human Services Coalition and the King County Alliance for Human Services, there are always people on hand to speak up for human services – for child care, for domestic violence prevention, for senior programs. But until recently, there was never anyone on hand to speak up for Public Health.

Now there is: A small but growing group called simply People for Public Health. And the Puget Sound Alliance for Retired Americans was in on its creation.

When things are going well, we don’t think about our Public Health agencies. We take for granted that somebody is:
*Protecting our food and water supplies,
*Maintaining emergency medical services,
*Providing vaccines (for example, for children during flu season),
*Preventing injury and violence,
*Promoting healthy eating and exercise,
*Controlling communicable diseases…and more.

If those functions were NOT being attended to, we’d all be at risk.

And that could happen. In 1999, when the old, progressive Motor Vehicle Excise tax was replaced by a flat $30 tax per car, Public Health agencies across the state lost their major source of funding. The “backfill account” later established by the legislature never did fully replace it. And since 2009 – when needs are rising and more people are seeking health care from a Public Health clinic – Public Health has had to absorb still deeper cuts – everything from staff layoffs to reduction or elimination of basic health services.

Like local governments across the state, Seattle and King County now face still another round of cuts in Public Health staffing and functions. Being considered for possible reductions are the HIV/AIDS program, public health visits to pregnant women, jail-related health services (chiefly, how medications are dispensed), adult health visits at the East Gate Health clinic and nearly 90 full-time equivalent staff.

That’s why we’ve formed People for Public Health, a Seattle-King County grassroots group committed to safe and healthy communities. Our members are social and health professionals, retirees, health sciences students, people working with low-income populations and people from the community.

We’re showing up at hearings on the city and county budgets, using our two minutes at the microphone to ask that public health agencies be kept strong enough to carry out their mission.

All of us have a vested interest in public health. Today, more than ever, public health needs strong voices. If you wish to be such a voice, or simply to keep in touch with our work by email, send your contract information to People for Public Health: amidei@drizzle.com.

Means testing: Here’s what’s wrong with it

By Nancy Amidei and Will Parry

“Means testing” Social Security is a slick, seductive idea being promoted by Social Security’s enemies, supposedly to address the federal budget deficit. But like proposals to raise the Social Security retirement age, means testing has nothing to do with the deficit, and everything to do with emasculating Social Security.

So how would means testing apply to Social Security? It’s simple: Continue to require everybody to contribute to the Trust Fund from their paychecks, but abandon the established practice of paying benefits based on those contributions. Instead, pay benefits based on “need.” That is, reduce or eliminate benefits for those with incomes above a certain level.

Note that means testing, whatever its form and whatever its rationale, betrays two basic principles of Social Security: First, that benefits be universally available; and second, that a benefit be an earned right. Everyone who works and pays into the system is entitled to a benefit. It’s always worked that way.
That’s why the Puget Sound Alliance for Retired Americans and its partners in the Social Security Works/Washington coalition have explicitly rejected means testing: “Principle No. 3: Social Security is an insurance policy, and as such should not be means tested.”

In a survey of nearly 1,500 people last year, hefty majorities said they had no problem with having to pay Social Security taxes. Why the popular support? It’s the program’s universality. People know that that they will receive a monthly Social Security check when they become eligible.

It’s a well understood principle in Washington, DC, that “programs for poor people tend to become poor programs.” Consider a means tested program like TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Only poor people qualify. Eligibility is strict. And the benefits are temporary and meager.

Grotesquely inadequate as it is, TANF is always on the chopping block when government budgets get tight. The wealthy and the powerful do not spring to the defense of TANF. Why should they? They’re means-tested totally out of the program.

In summary, to means test Social Security is to place it on the proverbial slippery slope, its funding without powerful champions, inevitably degenerating into a program no longer recognizable as Social Security, sooner or later to become simply an under-funded twin to TANF. The enemies of Social Security want the program to wither away and die. That’s why they churn out slick arguments for means testing.

(Nancy Amidei is a member of PSARA.)