...so, by golly, we should cut their funding. Insofar as anything runs through George Bush's mind, this must be it. As recently as February, he promised to "work to confront barriers that still confront Americans with disabilities and their families." It was 37 days ago, and the press release is here: White House Press Releases. I concede that I can't remember everything I did on February 1, but everything the President does is written down, photographed, and preserved for posterity. If I can look it up, he can look it up.
Yet somehow it's slipped his mind. Instead of eliminating barriers, he's creating them. The 2007 budget proposal cuts $3.6 billion from Medicaid funding targeted to disabled children. And this budget cut, mind you, is on top of the Medicaid cuts made in January, which caused 39,000 children to lose Medicaid eligibility entirely.
Here's the conundrum. We have compulsory attendance laws in this country. They vary by state, but they exist. The other way to say the same thing is that one of our bedrock (and radical) principles as a body politic is that we guarantee access to education. Moreover, we have laws addressing the reality that children with disabilities need special services -diagnostic, medical, social, and pedagogical- to be able to take advantage of the available education. All of those requirements are still in place.
However, President Bush has proposed cutting the funds for medical equipment on buses, transportation to medical appointments, and the administrative costs for identifying children with special medical and educational needs. These services don't defend us from anybody, I suppose. Actually, he almost came right out and said that. In the State of the Union, he claimed to be cutting programs that are either "performing poorly or not fulfilling essential priorities." Of course, he also talked about human-animal hybrids, so I'm not sure how much stock we should put in anything he said that night.
But I digress. The fact is these kids have to go to school and they have to be offered services, but the money won't be available at the federal level to pay for those services. Costs will have to shift to school districts and states. Of course, they're already struggling, too, and the consequences of this cost shifting will be borne in some measure by everyone in the state and the district. But the largest measure of the burden will be borne by the kids. As with so many of Bush's policies, the long-term consequences of having failed to provide services for a cohort of America's children will be somebody else's problem.
Shame on him -again.
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