As lawmakers move ahead with plans to cut at least $2 billion from Florida's battered state budget, the Senate panel in charge of healthcare and other safety-net services recommended cutting more than $800 million alone from Medicaid and other programs.
The Senate is also looking at making more than $800 million in cuts to public schools as a way to balance the 2008-09 budget, which takes effect July 1.
''We don't get to print money, so we have to make do with what we've got,'' said Sen. Durell Peaden, a Crestview Republican who leads the health and human services appropriations committee. ``We aren't magicians. These are painful.''
Peaden said many of the cuts came in ``administrative areas, which are considered the fat of the budget.
''We're trying to do as much as we can without hurting the people who need these services the most,'' he said.
PROPOSED CUTS
If the budget recommendations outlined Wednesday are adopted, it would mean:
• The elimination of a Medicaid program that helps 24,000 people, who are either elderly or disabled, with prescription drugs and other services.
• Limiting the state's Medically Needy program -- which helps the working poor pay for transplants and other catastrophic illnesses -- to just children and pregnant mothers. This would remove about 16,000 people statewide from the program.
''This will eliminate pharmaceutical care for people who, if they don't get pharmaceutical care, will die,'' predicted Tony Carvalho, president of the Safety Net Hospital Alliance of Florida. ``They are in a life-threatening situation.''
The cuts to the Medically Needy program would not take effect until November 1. The Senate is proposing to use $159 million in the $2 billion Lawton Chiles Endowment to keep the program intact for several months. Gov. Charlie Crist had proposed using $400 million from the endowment -- funded by a legal settlement with tobacco companies -- to help avoid deep cuts to health programs.
So far, Crist's budget recommendations are being widely ignored. Among those is his pitch to spend more than $60 million on a pilot program to help the uninsured in Miami-Dade, Broward and other counties.
Instead lawmakers are focused on cutting many programs. Besides the cuts to the Medically Needy, the Senate is proposing to require prior authorization for any Caesarean childbirths unless it's an emergency, cutting money for a program that helps children born with deformities such as cleft palates and capping the amount the state pays to provide services for those who are severely disabled.
CHILD WELFARE
The Senate is also looking at cutting more than 700 jobs in the Department of Children & Families, including some who investigate cases of child abuse.
''With this budget, we'd be destroying all we worked to build up for children these past few years,'' said Sen. Nan Rich, a Sunrise Democrat who objected to cutting DCF money.
