This week’s Isthmus newspaper contains a great cover story by Joe Tarr, “So Long, Safety Net?”.  He shares stories from families and advocates about the threats to government assistance, and uncertainty about what this will actually mean for families.  As WCCF’s Jon Peacock said in the article, families who depend on these programs are “scared to death.”  Though we now know that unspecified cuts to Medicaid in the biennium budget total more than $466 million, we still don’t know how those cuts are going to be made, and how exactly they’re going to impact families.

Earlier this week WCCF shared some of our insights about likely effects of the budget on low-income working families in a paper by Tamarine Cornelius.  The Georgetown Center on Children and Families also released a report highlighting the effects of increasing premiums in BadgerCare Plus – a sharp decline in children and families receiving coverage, adverse selection of program participants (which increases costs), and an increase in the use of emergency rooms for routine care.

It’s extremely frustrating that we don’t know more about the specific effects of the proposed budget cuts and may no longer be able to hold our legislators directly accountable for the polciy changes.  An editorial by WCCF Executive Director Ken Taylor explains why legislators should reconsider their actions in Act 10, the so-called “Budget Repair Bill,” to hand over to an unelected state official sweeping power to rewrite the laws governing the health care safety net.

Sara Eskrich