The scandalous headlines of the past few days have reminded us of the power that one twisted individual has to wreak social havoc and destroy the lives of innocent children. I am, of course, referring to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.
The Walker administration's new plan to give Medicaid a budgetary haircut means tens of thousands of Wisconsin residents -- half or more of them helpless, at-risk children -- would likely lose their current access to public health care. Arguably, that plan is child abuse on a far slower but massively greater scale than the sexual abuse tragedy at Penn State University. Worse yet, cruel and counterproductive ideas like this latest from Walker are being mounted by Republican statehouses around the country
Here's how the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel today summarized the Walker plan:
The [state legislature's] Joint Finance Committee approved 11-4 a proposal by GOP Gov. Scott Walker's administration to help bridge a more than half-billion-dollar budget gap in the rapidly growing health plans. All Republicans voted in favor and all Democrats against.
The proposal doesn't need any further approval from state lawmakers but must still win federal approval from President Barack Obama's administration by the end of the year - a significant hurdle.
The Medicaid health plans cover about one in five state residents - almost 1.2 million people - and provide everything from doctor visits for poor families to nursing home care for the elderly. To help control rapidly increasing costs in the programs, Walker's administration wants to decrease benefits for a quarter of a million recipients, increase premiums for tens of thousands of others by up to tenfold, and drop coverage for adults and children for at least a year if a family misses a payment.
It's sad that the emphasis so far on Walker's plans to cheapen public education and public health in Wisconsin has been on money and politics, rather than living, breathing people. Apparently, nothing short of an assault in a university shower stall will get us to start thinking about these awful social-service policies in terms of humanity. That's what we need, because such policies are about nothing less than what government will or will not do to help our own children, and the children of our neighbors.
Someday, Wisconsin newspapers and TV news will run many stories on the human misery resulting from Walker's policies. Of course, they may not spend enough time explaining to us why the misery is so much more widespread or how it traces back to Walker and his misplaced priorities and mean-spirited governance.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but just for the record: Our country's single greatest asset and treasure is not gold, lumber, water, uranium, or technology. It's our children. Raise them right, teach them well, and they will become a new generation of American adults who lead their lives in wise and socially positive ways. Raise them poorly and their misery will be transferred into social crisis and wasted billions of dollars as the nation is forced to re-educate, medicate and imprison many of them. It's your choice. It's our choice.
Nevertheless, just as it did when it whacked nearly a billion dollars from state public school aids earlier this year, the Walker administration's own choice once again is to do less to protect and assist Wisconsin kids. Provide affordable health care to tens of thousands of poor kids and their parents? Can't afford it, says Walker's secretary of un-health and dysfunctional-family services. Well, then, what CAN we afford? Nine-figure state tax breaks for corporations and wealthy individuals, that's what.
As questionable as his administration's approach might have been on any number of other issues, the one thing you can accurately say about the previous governor, Democrat Jim Doyle, was that he cared about children and backed up that sentiment with programs designed to better look after them. That's now all rapidly being undone under the guise of Walker budget balancing -- and never mind that Doyle balanced every single one of his own budgets without weakening the state's social fabric and especially support for children.
Never mind that Wisconsin's prisons are already bursting at the seams with young adults who got into trouble with the law after a despairing, threatening childhood. Walker is busy ensuring there will be many more of these victims in waiting down the line, costing state taxpayers billions more to feed and incarcerate them. That's why if we renamed the current Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services to accurately reflect the attitudes of current state leadership, we'd seriously have to consider "Department of Despair."
The really sad thing is that Wisconsin went through a similar exercise during the Tommy Thompson administration in the '90s, when state Republicans -- abetted by politically nervous minority-party Democrats -- basically ended Aid to Families With Dependent Children. The popular term for AFDC was "welfare," but what AFDC really was about was ensuring that kids from poor families would have some protection against hunger, disease and poor shelter.
AFDC was replaced with TANF -- Temporary Assistance to Needy Famliles -- but as that program has evolved over the years, the help has become even more temporary and the assistance even more miserly.
Just as Walker now makes it next to impossible for people with ID to obtain ID in order to vote, the Thompson reforms (actually, de-forms) made it nearly impossible for poor Wisconsin families to get out of poverty. In both cases, state government bureaucracies implemented numerous Catch-22 rules designed to frustrate and ultimately dissuade applicants from persisting in actually trying to obtain help. The emphasis was on forcing single mothers to train for work -- not that there ever was much training or much work, or much day care to look after their kids while they jumped through increasingly smaller TANF hoops. The "hand up instead of a hand out" turned out to be mostly one big slap in the face.
And yet Thompson, the chief enabler of that failing devolution in social services, is now preparing to run as Wisconsin's next new US senator. No rest for the wicked, apparently.
Word of this new anti-child proposal from Walker should be all anyone needs to realize that the current resident of the governor's office and his GOP majorities in the Wisconsin legislature are simply uncaring, unwise and uber-cynical. Hurting kids in exchange for political points is the lowest of the low. Effectively denying so many of the state's children life-saving health services and fundamental access to good schools and good nutrition amounts to slow-motion child abuse. It's also abuse of power on a fantastic and shocking scale. You'd have to be a sociopath to think otherwise.