Texas’s Brilliant Plan to Cut Medicaid for Disabled Children

[David_42]

This is fucking nuts, but this is texas..
Texas's Plan to Cut Medicaid for Disabled Children

The Texas Legislature, as established by the constitution, is both evidence of the state’s historical commitment to limited government and a bulwark against a more interventionist state. Regular legislative sessions last just 140 days every other year. An inevitable result of this system is that every session, for good or for ill, a lot of legislation is killed. But as Dan Patrick announced in January, shortly after being sworn in as lieutenant governor, it’s “a new day” in Texas. And a curious backlash that has emerged over the past few weeks illustrates the converse possibility: sometimes a bill, being hurried along the path, will survive the passage without being fully considered until after the fact.

A provision in the two-year state budget for the forthcoming biennium illustrates the potential pitfalls of that situation. Last month Emily DePrang, of Quorum Report, reported that advocates for children’s health were becoming alarmed about a provision calling for severe cuts to the Texas Medicaid Acute Care Therapy Program. The budget calls for about $400 million worth of cuts to the program (which is, like other Medicaid programs, funded by state and federal dollars). Put differently, as DePrang explained, here’s what that means:

As written, they’ll slash by 25 to 90 percent what Texas pays for medically necessary physical, occupational and speech therapy through the Texas Medicaid Acute Care Therapy Program, which serves about 440,000 poor people with severe disabilities each year, most of them children. Advocates say at least 7,500 therapists will lose their jobs and 60,000 children will lose access to medical care because of the cuts. [The Texas Health and Human Services Commission] can’t refute these claims because it conducted no research in potential impact before announcing the new rates on July 8th.

- See more at: Texas's Plan to Cut Medicaid for Disabled Children