The House released its budget today (along with the Senate), but the House did not specify where their $857 million in new revenue is going to come from. House Finance Chair Rep. Ross Hunter (D-48, Medina) is going to lay that out tomorrow. (The Senate did specify: $518 million closing tax exemptons; $312 million in a .3 percent sales tax increase; and $86 million from higher cigarette taxes.)
The debate inside the House caucus is between either raising the money by getting rid of tax exemptions and doing some targeted sin taxes (on those blue fructose Frankeberry drinks, for example) or going with a sales tax increase. The liberals are on the exemption and sin tax side while the conservatives, like Ways & Means Chair Rep. Kelli Linville (D-42), are for the sales tax.
However, compared to the Senate’s proposal, the House budget has already won some praise from health care and senior advocates.
Jerry Reilly, a senior advocate and star player in the Rebuilding Our Economic Future Coalition (a coaltion of over 115 liberal advocacy groups—including labor, education, and health care lobbyists— pushing for new revenue to address the state’s budget crisis) points out that while the Senate cuts Medicaid programs and the Senior Citizens Services Act ($1 million in funding for basic health information and programs like transportation assistance for seniors) and doesn’t restore home care for about 8,100 clients nor restore adult day health care for about 600 seniors—the House bill funds the Medicaid programs (personal care services for 700 elders and 700 people with disabilities) and the Senior Citizens Services Act. Although it does not restore the home care cuts or the day health care cuts.
Both the Senate and House restored pharmacy co-pays for seniors that the Governor’s budget cuts.
Another member of the Rebuilding Our Economic Future Coalition, Lance Hunsinger, head of Community Health Network of Washington, also prefers the House budget. He criticizes the Senate for cutting funding for community health centers and jeopardizing primary care for 70,000 uninsured patients.
“Simple math shows that without these critical programs, clinics will close,” Hunsinger said in a press statement. “Access to preventive care for the uninsured will become even more difficult, and people will delay care until they end up in the hospital. The financial burden of caring for the uninsured does not go away. Those uncompensated hospital costs are passed along to all of us in the form of higher insurance premiums.”
There are $653 million in cuts in the House budget, including $202 million to the Department of Health and Human Services, $1.5 million from early learning, $24.2 million from corrections, and $22.5 million from the Department of Natural Resources.
The Rebuilding Our Economic Future Coalition is the group behind the green “Revenue” buttons you see on the Olympia campus (and around Seattle)—the agitprop part of their campaign to push for a revenue rather than cuts solution to the $2.8 billion shortfall. “I have told my people to take off the revenue buttons,” Reilly just told me on the phone between testifying at committee hearings today. “[The legislature] just isn’t proposing sufficient revenue,” he explained in a moment of defiance, protest, and disappointment.
