Monday, February 19, 2007
News PeachCare nightmare goes on
Posted by Web Editor on Mon, Feb 19, 2007 at 6:10 PM
Asthma strikes without warning.
When her 9-year-old son DeLante suffered from frequent attacks, Terronda Riggins used to take him to the emergency room, where nurses hooked him up to a nebulizer to get the wheezing under control.
An asthmatic lives that way: one breath removed from the ER, or worse.
DeLante Mayes is healthy now. His mother says that without PeachCare, she wouldn't have been able to buy him an inhaler, which kept the asthma at bay. Now he doesn't even need the inhaler, and the dreaded emergency room visits are in the past. But a spell of wintertime bronchitis threatens to close DeLante's airways. The reality of asthma is that if untreated, the disease can return. An asthmatic or the mother of an asthmatic learns in the worst of circumstances to prepare for the unexpected.
What Terronda Riggins wasn't expecting was that PeachCare wouldn't be there.
But that's a possibility she and DeLante and thousands of other Georgians are now confronting. The state faces a $130 million shortfall of federal funds that provide health-insurance coverage for 270,000 children of low- and moderate-income families. For more than two years now, Riggins has paid $10 a month to keep DeLante enrolled in PeachCare.
Days away from a funding freeze caused by the long-term inattention of federal and state lawmakers to the program's shrinking finances, she received no notification from the state. Instead, she learned about the PeachCare funding crisis by watching the news.
She blames Bush.
"I think what's happened is the government has put its priorities into things like war and materials for war, and not children," says Riggins, an Atlanta native who is employed as a medical biller.
In the longer term, the money for DeLante to combat his asthma is likely to be there.
Researchers with the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute say the federal government will reinstate the funds, even though there is no provision to do so in Bush's budget.
"Georgia is not the only state in this situation," says senior health care analyst Tim Sweeney. "Because Georgia is not the only state, the likelihood that the feds won't respond is unimaginable. Other states are also facing significant shortfalls."
A Democrat-controlled U.S. Congress, which sympathizes with the program, will find a way to include the funds, says Alan Essig, executive director of the GBPI. But the appropriation won't be in time to immediately fund the PeachCare program, which runs out of money March 1.
That is why the Legislature is scrambling to get some money together, and why the supplemental budget process has shuddered to a halt until lawmakers establish an emergency funding source.
"PeachCare has sucked the air out of everything else," Essig says. "We don't know what the House decisions are going to be. There is nothing to react to. The Legislature hasn't moved on it yet."
What galls Essig is that rather than providing full emergency funds for the program or finding other federal funding sources -- through Medicaid, for example -- the Legislature is looking to chop down the eligibility requirements for PeachCare. At a time when the Legislature wants to allocate money for boat docks, cut taxes for upper-income senior citizens and implement health-insurance reform by giving tax incentives to the healthy and wealthy, House Speaker Glenn Richardson has proposed axing 13,600 moderate-income children off the PeachCare rolls.
And Gov. Sonny Perdue stands by and watches.
"Philosophically, what's the bad thing about ensuring affordable health insurance for our children?" Essig asks. "We knew this day was coming. You can't claim to be a children's governor at the same time you're saying it's more important to fund other things."
Georgia and Terronda Riggins and DeLante are waiting.
But as with other ailments that afflict children, asthma doesn't wait.
-- Max Pizarro
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