The GOP’s Gimmicks-R-Us “Balanced” State Budget About To Be Blown Up

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Tea-Publican Arizona legislature was fairly warned that their gimmick to cut childless adult patients from AHCCCS violated the Arizona Constitution (Proposition 204) but they went ahead and did it anyway so they could claim that they "balanced" the state budget. Now that gimmick is about to blow up in their faces. A special session is almost certain.

Tim Hogan of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest is going to follow through on his promise to sue the state over AHCCCS cuts, as early as Friday. Lawsuit looms over Medicaid cuts:

Attorney Tim Hogan, who last month said he was inclined to wait until federal officials ruled on the plan, said Wednesday that an administrative rule since proposed by the state's Medicaid program has prompted him to move more quickly.

The rule spells out the process for freezing or eliminating coverage for childless adults enrolled in the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System. It's required under the fiscal 2012 budget approved by Arizona lawmakers and Gov. Jan Brewer, which would save more than $500 million through program and service cuts, provider payment reductions, benefits limits and mandatory co-payments.

Hogan said he believes the details in the proposed rule provide sufficient basis to challenge the Medicaid cuts in court. Plaintiffs will include several AHCCCS enrollees and health-care providers.

Voters agreed to cover childless adults in 2000 under Proposition 204. Hogan will argue that eliminating their health insurance would violate the Arizona Constitution under Proposition 105 in 1998 which requires a three-fourths vote by the legislature to amend any approved ballot measure (i.e., Proposition 204), and will ask the court to block the cuts.

Hogan no doubt will seek an injunction to prevent the cuts from taking effect during the course of the lawsuit. He will need to establish irreparable harm to the class of litigants, which should not be difficult to establish with an estimated 150,000 people about to lose their health coverage in the first year, primarily childless adults.

This will blow a hole in the GOP's Gimmicks-R-Us "balanced" state budget. Governor Jan Brewer met with House and Senate leadership earlier this week to discuss potential special sessions, including the event of this lawsuit and a restraining order.

Governor Brewer and the GOP leadership no doubt will try to portray Tim Hogan and AHCCCS patients as the villains here for having to come back and make additional budget cuts to other programs.

But the real villains here are the ideological extremist Tea-Publicans who will never raise taxes for any reason to balance the state budget, as they are constitutionally obligated to do.* This is fiscal irresponsiblity and gross incompetence, and constitutes what I would term legislative malpractice.

* See the Arizona Constitution, Article 9, Section 3. Annual tax; purposes; amount; tax laws; payment of taxes into state treasury:

The legislature shall provide by law for an annual tax sufficient, with other sources of revenue, to defray the necessary ordinary expenses of the state for each fiscal year. And for the purpose of paying the state debt, if there be any, the legislature shall provide for levying an annual tax sufficient to pay the annual interest and the principal of such debt within twenty-five years from the final passage of the law creating the debt.