A BUDGET STAND

With control of the budget in Congress, Republicans largely remain determined to cut Medicaid and other social service programs while insisting on huge tax cuts, producing a dangerous double of fewer government services and deeper debt. Seven Senate Republicans, however, are looking for quiet ways to protect those programs or even roll back some of the tax cuts. The most likely way is to remain united in opposing a budget resolution unless it retains at least most of the money for Medicaid and protects programs such as foster care and child care from the ax.

The seven senators, led by Gordon Smith of Washington, include Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, as well as Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Mike DeWine of Ohio. They are worried primarily about Medicaid, which the House wants to cut by between $14 billion and $20 billion over the next five years. The Senate voted to flat-fund Medicaid plus the cost of inflation. It isn’t yet clear how those two versions would be reconciled, but one terrible idea would cut less from Medicaid but instruct the Senate Finance Committee to meet deeper overall savings, with the likely vulnerable options being programs such as the earned income tax credit or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.

Given the growing number of families without health care and the increasing unaffordability of health insurance for businesses, the problem with deep cuts to Medicaid should be obvious. It seemed to be to the seven senators when they prepared a letter to House and Senate budget chairmen saying Medicaid, “which serves 52 million people who are indigent, elderly or disabled, is a lifeline to a higher-quality life. … Rash decisions about this program that are rushed through Congress strictly in the name of savings and budget cuts place these people at high risk, and it is something we oppose.”

But before they sent the letter, Majority Leader Bill Frist invited the group to a discussion on the issue, and that was the end of the letter. This is a shame because what they wrote made sense, and having it known that they stood firmly on this position would have been helpful to force budget conferees into backing down on Medicaid cuts. Budget processes are not simple, however, and the politics of wanting many things within the budget as well as wanting a budget resolution itself apparently dampened enthusiasm for the letter.

The proposed tax-cut extensions over five years would total $106 billion in the House and $129 billion in the Senate – on top of the cuts since 2001 that have worsened the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars already. The decisions made in the next couple of weeks about these cuts and about the programs the taxes could otherwise fund will have large effects for many years, on the poor and the taxpayers of the future.

Maine’s senators have stood up to party pressure before; they are needed now to oppose the “rash decisions” that may present themselves again through the budget resolution.