Kennedy Jabs Malloy On Medicaid Cuts

Democratic State Sen. Ted Kennedy, Jr. (pictured) Thursday criticized Democratic Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s decision to make $103 million in emergency health cuts to avoid a deficit in this year’s fiscal budget, saying Medicaid was ​“the last program” the governor should have touched.
 
Responding to a question posed at a morning legislative breakfast in Branford, Kennedy, a longtime health care lawyer who speaks often about health care economics, did not mince words. 

“Medicaid should be the last program that you actually touch in state government,” Kennedy said emphasizing the word “last.” “Why? Because it is money coming from Washington, D.C. What’s happening is that when the governor cuts this money out of the state budget he is basically taking three times of the money out of the health care economy in our state,” he said.

Kennedy and State Rep. Sean Scanlon (D-Guilford and Branford) were guests at a legislative breakfast sponsored by the Shoreline Chamber of Commerce and AT&T and held at the Parthenon Diner in Branford. State Rep. Lonnie Reed (D-Branford) and State Rep. Vincent Candelora (R-North Branford) were supposed to attend but were unable to.

Both Kennedy and Scanlon indicated they were stunned by the governor’s decision. Kennedy told about 30 people who attended the breakfast, that the Medicaid program in Connecticut is a “joint federal and state program ,” so state cuts trigger additional federal cuts, found money (reimbursements) that the state loses as well.

So doing the math he said, “when the governor cuts this money out of the state budget he is basically taking three times of the money out of the health care economy in our state.” He said Yale-New Haven Hospital “has to bear over 80 percent of these Medicaid cuts. Many of the employees who work at Yale live in our district. I think that is really the reason why I am upset by this decision.”

According to a story in the CT Mirror, chief among the governor’s cuts “is a $63.4 million reduction in Medicaid payments to hospitals. That also triggers a loss of approximately $128 million in matching federal dollars. These funds, though outside of the state budget, also would otherwise be transferred to hospitals. Counting both federal and state funding, the cut to hospitals amounts to $192 million, according to the legislature’s nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis.” 

Malloy’s spokesman Devon Puglia, criticized high executive salaries at hospitals and said the hospitals can find cuts there. He accused critics of the governor’s cuts of “standing with CEOs, asking taxpayers to subsidize multimillion-dollar salaries. That’s their message, that they want the residents of this state to fund tens of millions of dollars in executive compensation. The hospital industry made hundreds of millions of dollars in profit last year, with executive teams making money hand over fist,” according to the CT Mirror story.

Asked after Thursday’s event if the governor had consulted him about the Medicaid decision before making it, Kennedy said he had not. 

A Democracy Or A Dictatorship?   

Jim Lamb, the manager of SARAH, a not-for-profit organization that provides services and programs for people with intellectual and other disabilities, was the first to raise the governor’s decision to slash $100 million from the budget, 80 percent of which relates to mental health.

“How do you explain this?” he asked. “Is this state a true democracy or is it a dictatorship?”

Kennedy observed that during the last legislative session, he and many others worked hard to restore similar cuts. “And then less than a week ago, the governor basically, after we took this tough vote, the governor essentially with one stroke of the pen eliminated all that funding that was so hard to put back into the budget. So I think there are many people, including me, who are not happy with this recent move by the governor.”

At the outset, Kennedy and Scanlon were asked by Emily Granelli of BHCares to discuss what each viewed as their greatest success in the last legislative session and their biggest disappointment. Each noted key bills they sponsored and saw enacted. Kennedy discussed his environmental bills that became law, especially the Long Island Sound Blue Plan and Scanlon discussed his prescription abuse pill bill that led to a new law
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Legislative Process Disappoints

Kennedy said he was most disappointed by the legislative process, and by that “I mean by the way we wait until the last minute to do the budget every year. No one can tell me that starting to debate the budget at 6:30 at night when we have a midnight deadline,” is a good thing, he said.

“What I mean by that is I am a rank and file member of the State Senate. Many of these items are negotiated by the leadership of the house, the senate and the governor’s office with really very little input or understanding of the rank and file. And I’m a new legislator so I am one of the rank and file. So we are presented essentially with a 750-page document and have less than 24 hours to read this document and… vote on this document.

“To me I think we need a new process. I think we need, perhaps what other states do which is to have a separate budget process.” He said all the other legislation that legislators have worked on for months “is held up and would probably pass unanimously, but they can’t get through because the session is dominated by this one (budget) document as you may know, but I think you have to understand. It puts people like Sean and me in a very difficult position where the budget is passed in what is called emergency certification. The emergency certification process is a statute that we have here in the state that basically says there are certain times, a natural disaster or a certain crisis that exists in such way that they can bypass the normal committee and go straight to a vote on the floor.

“It is a special process that exists. And what’s happened is that that process has been used in the last several sessions to actually do the budget. Now in my view this is not an emergency. We have two years to do a budget. So the emergency is essentially that of our own making if you think about it. In emergency certification process (unlike other bills) there are no committee hearings, No chance of deliberation and there is no chance for the public to comment on potential revenue raisers or taxes that we are contemplating so that people can respond. That’s why you get these unitary taxes, the GE response and the backlash that we saw because it comes out of nowhere.”

Scanlon agreed. Like Kennedy, he is a freshman legislator. He voted against the governor’s budget. So did Reed. Kennedy voted for it.

Scanlon (pictured) described the state budget as ​“not sustainable. The biggest victims are the people you are helping.” 

He said a new emphasis needs to be placed on state employees. ​“One group not touched is our state employees. I am Democrat. I believe in organized labor and the right of unions to succeed and prosper. But if we are asking people to give up their health insurance who cannot literally afford health insurance we should be asking people who have excellent benefit packages and plans to give up a little bit, too. And we can’t touch those workers,” he said, adding it was time to revisit this issue. 

As for the governor’s recent decision regarding Medicaid cuts, Scanlon called it ​“misguided. Yale loses $20 million,” he said. ​“I have received over 300 e‑mails from hospital employees who live in our district,” he added. They are deeply worried, he said. 

Republican state legislators would agree.

“The governor’s reckless cuts directly threaten the financial survival of many Connecticut hospitals, threatening health care access and quality and most likely hurting Connecticut’s most vulnerable,” Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano, R‑North Haven, said in the CT Mirror story.
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