Why I haven’t covered the state budget debacle much

by David Safier

I feel a little guilty for not doing a day-by-day narrative about the proposed budget cuts, especially cuts to education.

My only excuse is, I feel like I'm watching a multi-car highway accident unfolding in extreme slow motion. I know the crash is coming. The only questions left are, what will be the extent of damage to the vehicles and how many people will suffer injuries, have their lives ruined and — this is the part that makes it hard for me to write about this — how many will die because Republicans in power are failures as legislators and as people.

And I also know, this is only the initial pileup. The next set of cars — next year's budget — will plow into the mass of twisted steel blocking the roadway and make things much, much worse. Somebody should really get those cars out of the road and take the injured to the hospital, but, hey, we can't afford it, so what can we do? At least that's what the right wingers behind these budget bills tell us. Really, they say, it's not their fault.

Here's a summary from the Weekly of the out-of-control budget cuts careening toward us at full speed.

• All-day kindergarten is gone.

• KidsCare, the program that provides health insurance to children in households below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, is gone. That means we'll lose a lot of federal dollars that come into the state, because the feds provide a 3-to-1 match for the program.

• Healthy Arizona, the program that provides health insurance to people below the federal poverty level, is gone, with eligibility rolled back to one-third of the federal poverty level. If you're a single mom with two kids making more than roughly $6,100 a year, you will no longer qualify.

Even the Arizona Chamber of Commerce is against that one. Executive director Glenn Hamer—a former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party—says the move is just plain foolish.

"If you're taking 300,000 people off of health insurance, it doesn't mean they won't receive care," Hamer says. "Federal law requires that care be provided in the emergency room for people who go there for health-care needs. It's going to be covered one way or another. That's a highly inefficient, extremely expensive way to provide care."

Hamer says that ends up increasing costs for hospitals, which leads to a "hidden health-care tax."

And so on. I read about this stuff every day, but I swear, I can barely stand to write about it.