By LILLIAN ROBERTS
Executive Director
District Council 37, AFSCME

Our mayor, governor and president are all aiming severe cutbacks at the public health and hospital services that our members provide. The cuts would damage health care for infants, schoolchildren and the aged as well as low-wage workers and the unemployed.

Tearing holes in our medical safety net and weakening our emergency response system, the city, state and federal cutbacks all represent the unwise “cut now, pay more later” philosophy of government.

District Council 37 will not give up on the millions who depend on the public health care system for their very lives. And we will not surrender our jobs to those who create budget shortages by refusing to tax business fairly and giving huge tax breaks to the wealthy.

DC 37 and our national union, AFSCME, are fighting back. In city hospitals and City Hall, in Albany and Washington, we are battling the cuts. Our tools are posters and postcards, petitions and political action, community coalitions and compelling testimony in public hearings.

On AFSCME Lobby Day, March 30, we will unite with our union sisters and brothers from all over New York State to flood the state capital with volunteer rank-and-file activists. We will meet one-by-one with each legislator and we will speak with one loud voice: “Stop the cuts.”

Here in New York City, the mayor is trying to save money in a very troubling way — by reducing care for those who need it the most. As the end of social promotion pushes more students into summer school, Health Dept. budget cuts would remove 400-500 school nurses from the summer payroll. These Public Health Nurses are part of our emergency response system. They were there for us at Ground Zero and in the anthrax attacks. They are on call 24/7 for society as a whole. Without year-round pay to make ends meet, they may be forced to leave their jobs.

The mayor’s fiscal plan would close child health, infant mortality, asthma control and adolescent substance abuse clinics. Additional cutbacks would shut TB clinics (as the disease spreads in poor and immigrant communities) and cut the Office of Minority Health (while the cost of racial disparities in access to care is measured in human lives).

Medicaid under attack
In Washington and Albany, President Bush and Gov. Pataki are both trying to cut Medicaid, which now covers 47 million poor, elderly and disabled Americans. Along with their jobs, millions of workers have lost employer-provided medical insurance under the Bush administration, driving up Medicaid costs. The president’s proposed $23 billion budget cut really means cutting off people’s health care and damaging safety net providers such as public hospitals.

For health workers, Medicaid means jobs. Medicaid is a financial anchor of the health sector of our economy. It provides over half of the budget of New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corp., where thousands of DC 37 members work.

Gov. Pataki’s plan to reduce Medicaid this year by $1.6 billion statewide includes a $60 million blow at HHC. That’s on top of longstanding anti-urban discrimination in the state program. In the other 49 states, the program is funded half and half by the feds and the state. But New York makes local governments pay about one-third of the non-federal portion. This means that alone of the nation’s big cities with their large poor and immigrant populations, New York City bears an extra burden for Medicaid — $4 billion a year.

Now the governor’s proposed budget would cut Medicaid funds for the city’s most vulnerable — nursing home patients, disabled children, the elderly and SSI recipients. In the state Family Health Plus program, it would eliminate vision and dental services for low-income families and kick out low-wage workers whose employers refuse to provide health insurance as well as government employees.

Mr. Pataki’s plan would even tax Medicaid and other revenues received by HHC. Our public hospitals serve the vast majority of working people whose employers do not provide insurance. Just where could these people go if HHC is starved for funds? Saving hospitals is saving lives.

I am asking every DC 37 member to get involved now. What you can do is described on pages 5-7 and the back page of this PEP. Your phone call or e-mail can make a difference in the battle to stop these harmful cuts. As you talk with the politicians, focus on the fundamental principle: Health care is a right.

Instead of making repeated cuts in the current patchwork system, any government that cares about people should build a national health insurance system that covers everybody who needs it. That will be one of the key issues in the November election as we fight to take back America.