Small Fixes, Big Payoffs

There’s a consensus forming in the state Legislature that the most painful and damaging budget cut proposed by Gov. Gray Davis is the $758 million that would come from Medi-Cal health insurance programs for the working poor. But the hard truth is that most of Davis’ cuts may be unavoidable in light of the $23.6-billion budget shortfall. That’s why the Senate Budget Committee, which will begin hearings Thursday on the governor’s budget proposals, should be careful to focus on restoring programs that in part can pay for themselves and on paying for the restorations with new cuts or revenue.

Here are three changes that make sense, ones that would help keep counties solvent and create savings elsewhere in the budget:

* Allow Medi-Cal patients to reapply for their health coverage annually, as they do now, rather than four times a year, as Davis proposes. The governor would use a bureaucratic device for reducing the Medi-Cal rolls and sticking counties with the cost of caring for indigent patients. The seriously mentally ill in particular would lose coverage because they couldn’t deal with repeated applications for Medi-Cal. That would mean more people living on the streets, untreated. The streamlined system went into effect in 2001 after hard lobbying by advocates and editorial boards, including this one, urging the change. It will be hard to restore if it is lost.

* Trim the state prison budget. Davis’ only reckless spending is a $186-million increase in the state prison budget. Prison guards and their union are among Davis’ biggest campaign donors, but, according to the governor’s own officials, the state prison population decreased by more than 4,600 last year alone. On Saturday, a Senate subcommittee recommended taking $8million out of the prison budget and using it to restore full funding for drug courts, a $15-million program that saves taxpayers at least $43.4 million a year according to the Davis administration’s own count, by keeping people out of jail and clean and by keeping their children out of expensive, potentially traumatic foster-care group homes.

* Support two proposals to keep people out of prisons. The first, by Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles), would put 4,100 of the 75,000 people who violate parole each year through trivial, nonviolent offenses on intense “supervision parole” rather than in prison. Davis’ own prisons department singled out the 4,100 as people who posed the least risk to public safety, and the program would save $18 million a year. A second proposal would restore the $14 million that Davis eliminated from programs, such as the Village in Long Beach, that employ health professionals and recovering addicts to help people suffering from mental illness or addictions.

Yes, more revenue would be needed to do these things, despite their potential savings. Legislators may have to restore the annual vehicle license renewal fee to the level it was at during the Pete Wilson administration, and do it sooner than the middle of next year.

Such steps would help keep the counties out of deeper fiscal trouble. Retaining basic health-care improvements for the working poor and mentally ill would help keep them out of emergency rooms and, ultimately, off the streets.