Crossposted at Texas Kaos .
LINK Texas not meeting kids' Medicaid needs, court agrees.
Ruling in mothers' federal lawsuit means they can seek relief from state for failing to comply with 1996 agreement .
A group of mothers who sued Texas in the 1990s have won a legal victory in their fight to ensure that more children receive the Medicaid coverage to which they're entitled.
The 5th U.S. Circuit of Appeals has refused to dismiss claims that state officials have systematically denied Medicaid coverage to hundreds of thousands of Texas children for years.
Last year, senior U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice found the state in violation of a 1996 consent agreement that was meant to improve health-care access for Medicaid-eligible children and young adults.
State officials had sought to overturn that decision.
Let's digest all this so far. The state first threw these kids off the program in 1992, they agreed to a consent decree in 1996. They violated that. We are in 2006. The kids who were harmed by this, a number in the hundreds of thousands as you will see are now at least 14 years old, probably older. How obscene is this? Goodhair and the boys have been scoring political points by "cutting taxes" . To do that they literally threw poor kids off of the health care prgram. Of course they did more than that. Let's recall the breaking heat wave and poverty story from yesterday and today. Remember this one?
LINK It's high time that Rick Perry feels the heat for a change | Chris Bell for Texas Governor
"The System Benefit Fund in turn provided for the “Lite-Up Texas” program which gave a 17% discount on electricity rates to the state’s most vulnerable populations, which amounted to an average relief of about $25 a month for a family of four earning less than $22,625 a year. The government was doing its part to protect us from the unforgiving southern elements…
Until Rick Perry stole $427 million from the System Benefit Fund in September 2005.
Perry cut down the public utilities safety net and dumped the money into the state’s general revenue fund, which in our view amounts to fraud. Since last September, 363,317 needy homes once powered with help from the “Lite-Up Texas Fund” have been cut off. And now it’s July and the heat wave has hit.
But as the less fortunate in Texas scramble feverishly to figure out how they’re going to afford not to wilt in their own homes this summer, Rick Perry himself is just chillin’. He must be blasting the AC twenty-four-seven at the Governor’s Mansion, because his utility statement for May '06 was an unbelievable $5,522.86. And guess who paid the bill.
You did."
To anyone who has not joined the Republican Borg Collective the record is clear. Goodhair and the boys have and continue to cling to power by abusing the poorest and weakest and rewarding the powerful. [See my blog on the coal plants form earlier today ]
Back to our Medicaid story for a moment:
LINK
San Antonio attorney Susan Zinn represents six Texas mothers who first sued the state on behalf of their children in 1992, a lawsuit that led to the consent agreement.
Zinn applauded the decision that was made public Thursday. She said the plaintiffs now plan to seek additional relief from Justice.
"For years now, Texas Medicaid officials have not complied with the federal Medicaid law or the consent decree that they agreed to in the first place," she said. "Unfortunately, children are being hurt.
"About one-third of our state's children have Medicaid," Zinn said. "If they don't get care when they need it, their health will suffer. They won't be able to achieve their full potential in school or later as adults."
More than 2.7 million Texas children are qualified to receive Medicaid benefits, Zinn said, but hundreds of thousands are not receiving the benefits they should be.
Neither state officials nor Zinn would speculate what the cost would be if the children who are not now receiving benefits were to receive them.
The plaintiffs are seeking no damages, just coverage for all the Texas children who should be receiving services, Zinn said.
In his 112-page order in August 2005, Justice ruled that the state "violated and continues to violate multiple . . . provisions (in the agreement) without regard for the obligations contained therein."
So, lets pause again here. Where have we heard this one before? Executive officials ignoring court rulings, insisting they are above the law, while preaching the credentials as "law and order" conservatives? I think someone should start a Wiki or site just to keep track of the lying hypocries of the Repugs , at all levels. My head wants to explode when I try to tally up the totals. It is not just some oof the current crop of Conservative Republicans, it is all of them.
Mike Jones, a spokesman for the state Health and Human Services Commission, which oversees the Medicaid program, said Thursday that agency officials were reviewing the decision and had no immediate comment.
Thursday's ruling marked the latest in a series of legal decisions against the state.
The lawsuit was filed in 1998 to enforce the consent decree, and Justice ruled two years later that the state was failing to provide required services.
For their part, state officials argued that Texas was spending $16 million a year in outreach to ensure everyone was receiving services and that it was complying with federal requirements.
Evidence in the case showed, however, that the number of children on Medicaid who received no medical checkups jumped from about 1 million in 1998 to 1.45 million in 2004.
In his decision against the state, Justice noted that the number of children "who should have received (medical) services but received none has actually increased since the entry of the consent decree."
Medicaid is a joint state-federal health insurance program available to low-income Americans.
Let's see if we can figure out the Repugs strategy. Force the weakest citizens to sue you for the aide they are promised in law and justice. If you win, great. If you lose, ignore the decision, make the weakest citizens sue you again , trying to force you to abide by the first decision. Do a fig leaf program that you can trumphet to any concerned citizens, but does not meet the courts decree. Make the weakest and poorest citizens sue you again , trying to force you to abide fully by the first decision. When you lose, say you are studying the decision. Repeat the process as long as necessary, until you are out of power. Finally, leave the problem to your successors . This is especially nasty if they are Democrats, because then you can accuse them of "raising taxes" when they finally must comply with the court order.
The other lesson we can take from all this is that it is not specifically these Repubilcans or these Conservatives who are the problem. We get the same ham handed cruelty wherever Conservative Repubicans govern, local, state or national. It is the ideology which is broken. It cannot govern, because it does not belive in using government power to care for the American people. This present case is simply another instance of this kind of thinking.
Let me close with an unvarnished instance of this ideology. This guy:
LINK The e-mail, sent to news reporters, quotes the Rev. Grant Storm, a white minister and president of Conservative Christians for Reform, claiming a bailout mentality is ingrained in "black culture."
"The mentality is instilled within their churches and in their homes - of 'the government owes you, the government is your solution, and the government will come and help you.'
"When the government doesn't come and help them, frankly all they do is yap and complain," Storm says in an article titled "'Black Culture' Blamed for Hurricane Katrina Woes."
Welker, who announced in April that he would not run for re-election, said he forwarded the e-mail to promote a conference sponsored by the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington.
[snip]
"It has nothing to do with me," he said. "I think it's great that we can pass things on when people can learn from other people."
[snip]
Rep. Terrance Carroll, D-Denver, said Welker's reasoning is a poor excuse for sending an e-mail that's based on a bigoted idea that African- Americans are morally inferior.
"He may not be running for re-election, and we can all be thankful for that," Carroll said. "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get a different result.""
In its baldest form the argument is this: the poor don't matter. Black or white, they are morally and humanly inferior to the people like Goodhair, like Representative Welker. Welker and Perry and their like are so deeply assimilated into the Conservative Republican Blog Collective Mind, they can't see how uncompassionate, how deeply unchristian all this is. They literally write off the pain of poor children as being a good thing, since it forces them to become "self-sufficient"! They will NEVER get it! |
