Centerfield

Benefit Bomb: Daniels Wants Medicaid Slash

Living in Indiana these days is a lot like following Alice's white rabbit down an endless tunnel. Surprises - bad ones - wait around every corner. Governor Mitch Daniels' plan to hack apart Medicaid is just the latest in a string of bad surprises he's dropped on Hoosiers across Indiana.

Right before he added $1 billion in new spending to Indiana's bloated, sinking budget, Gov. Daniels complained about how he would need to cut whatever it took to decrease the deficit. Yeah, you do the math - $1 billion in new spending and rhetoric about having to make essential trims in government services. We're in a crisis situation, Daniels seemed to be saying, and Medicaid landed square in his sights.

Daniels has been ambiguous about his top secret plans for the Medicaid program - the "open door governor" doesn't want to talk about this one. Daniels has made senseless statements about Medicaid recipients, among the poorest Hoosiers in the state. He has claimed that they go to their doctor in limousines, a not-so-subtle hint of his that people can't be trusted with government money and that the program is corrupt enough to merit slicing away at. He has chastised recipients for what is in his mind "splurging." He has done everything but justify his plan.

Nearly 70% of Medicaid recipients in Indiana are children, children who deserve to have someone in the government watching out for them if their families do not have the means. This doesn't seem to bother Governor Daniels, who so blatantly made "the children" his campaign centerpiece not three months ago. Why, then, does he stand willing to cut their benefits in an area where they need it most? By 2007, The Indianapolis Star reports, nearly one million people - 700,000 of them children - will be on Medicaid. What do we say to them?

Are these families, these splurging families, wasting their Medicaid money? Are they wasting it on essential speech and occupational therapy so that their children can operate in an educational environment? Are they wasting it on special transportation so that their wheelchair-bound children can get in and out of the van? Maybe they're spending that money on diapers to keep their mentally disabled daughter or son sanitary.

They certainly aren't taking the family limousine to pick up expensive anti-seizure medicine, pills that, as the CEO of Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals, Governor Daniels lobbied to keep high.

Governor Daniels does not understand the burden of being poor and counting on that extra help Indiana's Medicaid program provides. Medicaid is not some luxury handout for the poor - it is a necessity that allows families struggling with intense medical bills to ask the government for a little help making ends meet. It allows families to get the treatment they need should something happen that is not covered in their insurance. Medicaid makes life livable for many who would not have much without it.

Perhaps if Governor Daniels focused more on creating meaningful and well-paying jobs, as he promised to do, Medicaid's burden would ease itself. The white rabbit is tunneling along in the wrong direction again, and Hoosiers are getting claustrophobic.

Brought to you by The New Democrat