Late Friday night the Joint Finance Committee (JFC) unanimously passed a motion that greatly improves the Governor’s proposal to centralize and privatize income maintenance (IM) administration. The IM program includes Medical Assistance, the FoodShare program, and the WI funeral and cemetery aids program. WCCF and other groups expressed many serious concerns about the Governor’s recommendations. (See, for example, our June 1 memo to the Joint Finance Committee.)
Though we still have concerns, the revised motion passed by Joint Finance addresses many of the problems that advocates and the counties raised – including a local presence for call/change centers, application processing and eligibility determinations, case management and lobby services. Thanks to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the majority of IM functions will remain in the care of public employees, both at the county and state level. To read more about the original proposals to privatize workers, and the USDA response, see the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel articles here and here. A recently released “letter report” from the Legislative Audit Bureau reinforced the USDA position, determining that privatizing aid enrollment through IM agencies breaks federal rules and is harmful to the programs. Jason Stein’s article in the Journal Sentinel gives a great overview of the audit.
The Finance Committee’s motion is a hybrid version of a plan recommended by the WI County Human Service Administrators and an alternative developed by DHS after they learned that USDA would not allow the privatization of key IM functions for the Food Share program. One area where the committee went with the DHS plan, instead of the county’s proposal, is with respect to financing new state contracts with the counties by redistributing county property tax dollars. The state will cut each county’s Community Aids funding by “an amount that is at least equal to” the county’s IM overmatch, and that funding – about $26.7 million statewide – will be redistributed among all the counties using a formula based on caseloads. (However, the JFC version adds $3 million for the administrative costs, in order to hold Kenosha County’s contirbution to $673,000 because Kenosh contended that most of its $4.6 million overmatch in 2009 was for purposes like case management, rather than core IM administration functions.) Our June 1 memo raised concerns about using those overmatch dollars.
The committee’s compromise keeps FoodShare administration at the Department of Health Services, allowing all IM programs to be administered by one state agency, with local service delivery.
The JFC motion also requires the Department of Health Services to study the costs and feasibility of federal approval of the following policies: 1) implementing photo ID requirements on Medical Assistance and FoodShare cards, and 2) promoting or requiring the purchase of nutritional foods and beverages by FoodShare enrollees.
Most of the changes made to the Governor’s proposal were welcome, but the details of implementation will be important. Without effective service delivery, oversight, and community input, these vital public assistance programs will not be successful.
Sara Eskrich
