Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
Officials predict the cuts will affect the working poor and people on Medicare.
By KATHRYN WEXLER
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 3, 2001
TAMPA -- After much debate and a defeated compromise, Hillsborough County commissioners voted 4-3 Thursday to cut its indigent health care budget by $2-million for each of the next two years.
The program is for people whose income is higher than the poverty level, but whose health care bills would wipe them out.
"It was very disappointing," Mary Ellen Gillette, chairperson of the Hillsborough County Health Care advisory board said afterward. "If we don't take care of these people now, they are going to become very, very ill and in the long run, cost the indigent health care even more."
The commission also voted 4-3 to cut the budget of the General Assistance Fund, which helps with utilities, rent or food for people struggling with a sudden illness. The fund's $4.5-million budget will be cut by $1.1-million, forcing the county to turn away about 700 families who would have otherwise qualified.
Commissioners Jan Platt, Thomas Scott and Pat Frank voted against the cuts.
"Given the downsizing in the economy," Scott said, "I just think that the actions we took tonight will significantly hurt the working poor, and that they really need (these programs)."
Cretta Johnson, director of the county's Health and Social Services, told the board that many of those who would be bumped from the program would be the working poor and people on Medicare whose prescriptions they must pay out-of-pocket.
It is estimated about 1,000 residents with dire illnesses and incomes marginally above the poverty level will now be left to fend for themselves when it comes to health care.
But commissioners Stacey Easterling, Ronda Storms, Jim Norman and Chris Hart were not swayed.
The indigent health care fund is fed by the quarter-cent sales tax, and a weak economy has meant lower county revenues. Meanwhile, prescription costs have soared, jeopardizing the fund's long-term financial health.
A motion was made to shift $1.6-million in the program's costs for next year from the indigent health care fund to the countywide general fund, and to reduce the number of people who qualify less drastically than the cuts being proposed.
But that proposal was seen by some commissioners as too generous and by others as too austere. It was defeated 4-3.
"We almost had it," Johnson said afterward, making a fist.
Storms said she couldn't support shifting the burden of indigent health care to taxpayers. Approving the request this year, she said, might mean the county will be asked to give even more money next year.
She said she voted to cut the alliance fund that helps people with bills because she wanted "to provoke people to take responsibility."
Other proposals to shift funding from the health care fund to the general fund did pass Thursday night, including the costs for committing the mentally ill and those for jail inmates.
"We just voted not to fund indigent catastrophic care and now we're going to fund offenders," Frank complained afterward. "There's something wrong with that."
- Kathryn Wexler can be reached at (813) 226-3383 or wexler@sptimes.com.