Medicaid

Spent six hours at the medicaid task force meeting on Friday. Was looking to give public comment at the behest of several members of the IDD community who had their reimbursement rates slashed. But they added a last second agenda item to listen to HCPF's brief on their status as we have now apparently overspent almost $150M on Medicaid this year (in a budget year we were already going to have to look at cuts). Horrible. But when I tried to reprogram just $300K from the film office or from ebike rebates, which would then be doubled to $600K by the feds, to simply delay the 25-50% cuts in household income to the IDD community for one year for income they had bought homes etc. with (and my effort to simply delay, not stop, giving ourselves a 6% pay raise this next year while we are slashing everyone else), and they were crushed in a bipartisan manner, something is seriously off in our budgeting. Also pointed out in session a new program started 3 years ago that was supposed to cost only $6-8M had ballooned to over $100M. And another "peer support program" paid for with low \-income medical dollars that was supposed to cost less than $50K had ballooned to over $100M . . . I was yelled at, ostracized and gaveled down for asking the question if those fiscal projections were either dishonest or incompetent. They had to be one or the other; and who was being held accountable and who is going to clean up that mess. But crickets. We just keep putting a band aide on the budget when major surgery is required.