Dear Mr. Ramirez,

I appreciate this opportunity to address the concerns raised by one of my constituents during KQED Public Radio’s The California Report. I am always pleased to hear my constituents voicing their views and participating in a dialogue about public policy.

Your caller asked if I would support making budget cuts to other state programs before supporting cuts to public health.

As most KQED listeners probably know, California faces a $23.6 billion deficit -- so cuts to the state budget seem inevitable. However, I believe that these cuts must be balanced with some additional revenue sources. I am urging my colleagues to support reinstating the tax brackets for the wealthiest two percent -- those households making more than $260,000 for the first bracket and more than $520,000 for the second bracket.

In addition, I have proposed a plan that would cut over $1.5 billion from prison funding. California should not be funding the construction of a new prison in Delano or housing thousands of foreign-born inmates. An overhaul of California’s prison system would free up funding for essential programs like health care and human services.

This May, I served as the acting chair of the Assembly Budget Subcommittee on Health and Human Services while the Subcommittee reviewed the Governor's proposed "May Revise" of the Budget. Although the Subcommittee faced more than $1 billion in proposed cuts to health and human services programs, we were able to restore more than $800 million in funding to these programs. These restorations required making cuts in other programs, overseen by separate Budget Subcommittees.

My Subcommittee was able to restore more than $260 million for Medi-Cal "optional services" such as dental coverage and medical supplies (including diabetes test strips and catheters). We restored more than $50 million to fund hospital trauma centers and hospitals that disproportionately serve individuals on Medi-Cal. The Subcommittee restored $155 million to retain a simplified reporting system for Medi-Cal clients, which means more clients may stay on aid for longer periods of time. We maintained a Medi-Cal program for clients transitioning off of public welfare programs to increase their ability to remain employed. And lastly, the Subcommitee restored funding to expand the Healthy Families programs to cover low-income adults, who currently have no health coverage.

While the majority of funding restorations made by the Subcommittee were in health programs, we were not able to restore all of the funding that the Governor proposed cutting. Some of the cuts we approved included reductions in provider reimbursement rates and reductions in the rates paid to pharmaceutical companies for drugs that Medi-Cal patients receive. While these are not budget cuts that I support, my goal was to do everything possible to protect children and low-income families from proposed program cuts.

Our success in restoring funding in the Budget Subcommittee is not the final action, however. The Budget Conference Committee has been meeting this month to hammer out a final budget plan. To date, the funding restorations we made have largely been maintained, but there is still a budget gap that exceeds $4 billion. So funding for health and human services programs continues to be at risk unless we are able to agree upon tax increases that provide the revenue needed to fill that gap.

Thank you again for contacting me. Please feel free to contact me if you have additional questions.

Sincerely,
Dion Louise Aroner
14th Assembly District