Kansas, under Gov. Sam Brownback, is reducing the services it provides to the poor in order to shrink state government and justify last year’s huge tax cuts. THE NATURAL assumption is, rather, that the poor in Kansas will continue to get poorer, that their children will live stunted lives and that the money that had been spent lifting them up is now going to the wealthy in tax reductions they don’t need.
An extensive article in Sunday’s Kansas City Star gave the details.
“. . . Roughly 384,000 Kansans, 13.8 percent of the population, live at or below the poverty line, which is $23,050 a year for a family of four. That number has risen by nearly 80,000 since before the recession began in 2008. Of those, 34,000 were children, whose poverty rate has increased from 14.5 percent to nearly 19 percent.”
Rather than responding to these facts by increasing aid to the poor, the state is doing the opposite.
Under the federal health care law, a state can expand its Medicaid program — which provides health care to the poor — and the federal government will pick up the tab. Gov. Brownback has refused to enroll Kansas in that program. As a result, somewhere between 120,000 and 140,000 low-income people may soon be without health insurance.
Critics also point out that the administrative decision to turn its Medicaid program over to three private health insurers rather than continue to provide it with state employees is almost certain to result in providing a lower level of care to a smaller number of the poor. Their logic is convincing: the for-profit companies which make up the KanCare group must make a profit. That profit can only be produced by cutting costs. Costs can only be reduced by serving fewer people and providing fewer services. The KanCare profits will be made, in other words, by squeezing the state’s poorest residents, Kansas hospitals and the other health care providers.
The state denies these charges. Using private companies will increase efficiencies, reduce the growth of Medicaid and save the state $500 million over five years, the state contends. This estimate of the savings was pulled out of thin air and is almost certain to be proved mythical. Health care costs continue to rise. Introducing an additional cost by hiring private companies to administer the program will increase the Medicaid bill unless the services provided are reduced.
Using logic and arithmetic to analyze the effect of policy changes is not a course followed by the administration.
The administration can therefore claim that eliminating food stamps for families involving 2,200 Kansas children didn’t make those children hungrier with poorer diets and that eliminating long-standing tax breaks available for 430,000 children and other dependents in poor families will have no ill effects on those families.
The Star story also reported that the Temporary Aid to Needy Families program — also known as welfare — has been reduced. TANF provides cash assistance to those whose annual incomes are no greater than 20 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $6,500 a year for a family of four. TANF checks average around $280 a month. About 39,000 severely poor Kansans were receiving TANF when Brownback took office. After his administration instituted stricter rules, about 38 percent of those participants — or nearly 15,000 of them — were cut off.
“ . . . One of the most drastic TANF rules is one that took welfare payments away from the entire family if any child in the family was not attending school.”
The state’s own numbers show that the monthly denial of benefits went from 66 percent to 74 percent. In comparison, only about 35 percent of TANF applications in Missouri are denied each month.
Phyllis Gilmore, secretary of the Kansas Department for Children and Families, insists that the reduced number of poor Kansans receiving state assistance indicates that the poor are finding jobs and don’t need state help. She agrees that she doesn’t have proof that this is happening but that “it is a natural assumption.”
Shame on the Kansans in power for showing such heartless contempt for the poorest among us.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
