Cheney Casts Tie-Breaking Senate Vote Cutting $40 Billion to the Poor

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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/22/1521254

 

 

 

 

Thursday, December 22nd, 2005

 

 

Cheney Casts Tie-Breaking Senate Vote Cutting $40 Billion to the Poor

 

 

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Yesterday the senate narrowly passed a budget bill to cut $40 billion

dollars of federal spending by ending funding for foster care, child

support and student loans. The bill would also impose new fees on

Medicaid recipients and new work restrictions on state welfare

programs. We speak with Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and

Policy Priorities about details of the bill. [includes rush

transcript] The $40 billion dollars in budget cuts is dwarfed by the

$70 billion dollar cost of a Republican proposal expected to be voted

on next year that would extend previous tax cuts enacted in 2001 and

2003. The contentious budget bill was passed by a 50 to 51 vote. Five

Senate Republicans joined the Democrats in opposing the measure. Their

combined votes would have led to a 50-50 tie. However, Vice President

Dick Cheney cut short his trip to the Middle East in order to cast the

tie-breaking vote.

 

As president of the Senate, Cheney was able to break the deadlock and

pass the measure. Critics of the bill note that the poor and middle

class would bear the brunt of the cuts. Democratic Senate leader Harry

Reid called it " an ideologically driven, extreme, radical budget. It

caters to lobbyists and an elite group of ultraconservative ideologues

here in Washington, all at the expense of middle class Americans. " The

American Council on Education announced this is the biggest cut in the

history of the federal student loan program.

 

* Robert Greenstein, Executive Director of the Center on Budget

and Policy Priorities.

 

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

 

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AMY GOODMAN: We are joined in Washington D.C. by Robert Greenstein. He

is the Executive Director of the Center on Budget and Policy

Priorities. Welcome to Democracy Now!

 

ROBERT GREENSTEIN: Good morning.

 

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Well, tell us about this

budget.

 

ROBERT GREENSTEIN: This bill, as you noted, cuts over $40 billion over

a five-year period, but you really can't get the flavor of it just

from citing the budget numbers. If you take, for example, the Medicaid

program, which is the principal health insurance program for tens of

millions of low-income children, families, elderly people and people

with disabilities, this bill makes very major changes in that program.

It authorizes states to particularly raise the amounts that people

just above the poverty line would have to pay each time they needed to

go to the doctor or the hospital. You take a family of three that's

making, say, $17,000 a year, various procedures, inpatient,

outpatient, for which they now are charged $3 per visit, under this

new bill they could be charged, depending on the treatment, anywhere

from $20 to $160 for each one of those treatments or procedures.

 

We have a body of research, Amy, that is this high that demonstrates

that when you put co-payments of even a fraction of that size on

low-income people, that in many cases they forgo the treatment or they

don't take the medication. Sometimes they will get better on their

own, but the research shows that in many cases they get sicker,

sometimes seriously so.

 

The bill also authorizes states to substantially reduce the healthcare

services that are covered under the Medicaid benefit package for

various groups, such as working poor parents. The changes in Medicaid

are pretty significant.

 

Another change in Medicaid, under this bill, native-born U.S. citizens

would have to provide birth certificates or passports to stay enrolled

in the Medicaid program. This is expected to have a racially

discriminatory effect, because studies show that as many as one in

five elderly African Americans don't have birth certificates, in many

cases because they couldn't be born in a hospital, because in the

South in those days before World War II, blacks often couldn't be

admitted to hospitals, and you often got your birth certificate

triggered in a hospital.

 

In the area of child support enforcement we have had a bipartisan

consensus for 15 years in Washington with heavy Republican involvement

that absent parents should pay their fair share, and there is a

program, which the federal government helps fund, to make sure that

child support payments are collected and provided to the children and

their mothers. This bill substantially cuts federal funding for that

program. The Congressional Budget Office, which is Congress's own

official analyst of these things, has reported that as a result of

this cut, $8 billion less in child support payments owed by

non-custodial parents will be collected and provided to the children

and their mothers over the next ten years. In other words, this will

cause significant increases in poverty.

 

The changes in welfare are also pretty profound. They're the biggest

changes since the 1996 welfare law, and they rewrite the '96 welfare

law to make it, in key respects, substantially harsher than the `96

welfare law itself was. There would be new requirements for the

percentage of parents that have to be in workfare type programs that

are set in such an unrealistic fashion that states couldn't meet them

and would then face fiscal penalties; and the easiest way for the

states to deal with, to ease those fiscal penalties, would be by

cutting the rolls. In particular, for poor, two-parent families,

married parent families, the new standards would be so unrealistic

that not a single state in the United States could meet them. They

would be required to have virtually every two-parent family in a work

program virtually full-time every week of the year. If a parent had to

miss a couple days from work because he or she was sick or their child

was sick, they wouldn't meet the standard for that month; and if a

small number of parents were in that circumstance, the state would

fail to meet the standard and would be penalized financially by the

federal government. Experts expect that many states will cut large

numbers of poor two-parent families from their rolls in coming years

in order to avoid these penalties.

 

As you noted, there are also major cuts in the student loan program.

There are major changes in the long-term care part of Medicaid that

will make it harder for a number of people to get long-term care

coverage when they need it. There are a variety of other changes, as

well. What's striking is that the Senate had earlier passed a bill

that didn't have a single low-income cut of this sort in it.. None at

all. The House, by contrast, had passed an extremely harsh bill, and

the difference was that the Senate got a lot of savings in the

original Senate bill by restraining well known overpayments to managed

care companies in Medicare and dealing with the very large mark-ups

that the big drug companies get for drugs provided in Medicaid by

reducing the prices Medicaid pays for drugs.

 

What happened behind closed doors over the weekend was that the drug

companies got protected. The cuts that affected them were taken out.

The managed care companies got largely protected. Nearly all of the

changes that would have restrained excessive payments to them got

taken out, and the cuts got redirected more heavily towards low and

moderate income families instead. Probably not an accident. If you

look at the campaign contribution data, you find that every

significant House Republican leader who has something to do with

Medicare and Medicaid policy is among the top recipients of campaign

contributions for the 2006 election cycle from both the managed care

companies and the drug companies.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Bob Greenstein, Executive Director of the Center on

Budget and Policy Priorities, we only have a minute, but I just wanted

to touch on the level of burden on students right now. Nearly a third

of all the savings in the final budget bill comes from student aid,

according to the Congressional Budget Office. Under the bill, college

students would pay higher interest rates on loans, banks receive lower

subsidies, Education Department will work with the I.R.S. to ferret

out students and parents who underreport incomes on financial aid

applications. In this last minute, the effect on students.

 

ROBERT GREENSTEIN: There will be effects on students, I think, both in

terms of fees and interest rates. The other thing that should be said

is that the savings from the students, from working poor families (who

I think will actually be hit harder than students), and everybody else

who suffers under this bill, not a dollar of those savings is going to

reduce the federal deficit. Every dollar is going to offset a portion

of the cost of tax cuts that'll be passed when Congress comes back

after its recess; and those tax cuts will go heavily to very high

income people, and, in some cases, a large share of them will go to

the people that make over a million dollars a year. So, it's really a

transfer in many – It's not deficit reduction. We're talking about a

transfer from people who have greater needs to people at very high

income levels and powerful forces that make large campaign contributions.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Bob Greenstein, thanks so much for being with us,

Executive Director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The

website www.cbpp.org, and you can go to our website at

democracynow.org for all links.

 

I'll end with a couple of paragraphs from the New York Times today:

" Republican negotiators said virtually all the cuts in student aid

would be borne by banks and other lenders, an assertion sharply

disputed by Democrats and college administrators, who said two-thirds

of the savings would be at the expense of students and their families.

Even as it makes those cuts, Congress is creating a new program for

students from low-income families who are eligible for Pell grants.

The amount of aid will not be based on financial need. To qualify,

students would have to be U.S. citizens, have completed a `rigorous

secondary school program of study' and be taking courses full-time at

a degree-granting institution of higher education. The student would

have to maintain a cumulative grade point average of at least 3.0.

Juniors and seniors will be eligible only if they've declared a major

in the physical or life sciences, computer science, math, technology,

engineering, or a foreign language deemed critical to national

security. " College and university groups, as well as most Democrats,

oppose the overall bill. As it becomes harder for students to get

money for college, it seems increasingly that it puts pressure on

young people to go into the military as an avenue to get to college.

 

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