Working Poor Deserve Backing
If you aren’t familiar with Washington state’s Basic Health Plan, you’re lucky.
It’s a plan for people whose low-paying jobs lack benefits like health insurance. For those whose premiums the state subsidizes, the Basic Health Plan can be what gets them off, or keeps them off, welfare.
Last fall, however, the program ran out of money and the state capped enrollment at 130,000. The waiting list is now at 70,000 statewide - 6,000 in Spokane County alone.
The numbers will swell as welfare reform policies move people from public assistance (where Medicaid pays their medical bills) to the work force (where the jobs that await them seldom include health insurance).
For the sake of low-income families - and the welfare reform cause - the state should raise the enrollment lid as high as it can.
In his 1997-99 budget proposal, Gov. Gary Locke wants to increase enrollments by 20,000 over the next two years. The Senate-passed budget scales that goal back to 5,000, and the plan that goes to the House floor this week cuts it even further, to 3,000.
The Senate budget is $100 million under the limits set by voter-approved Initiative 601. Restoring Locke’s level could, and should, be done well within that margin.
The Senate’s leading budget writer, Sen. Jim West, R-Spokane, believes adding too many needy people to the Basic Health Plan now will incur excessive costs in what legislative number crunchers like to call the “out years” - those beyond the two-year budget cycle they are working on now.
But if West and his fellow conservatives want reductions in the welfare rolls to be accompanied by increases in the number of stable, self-supporting households, they will see the Basic Health Plan as a prudent, not to mention humanitarian, investment.
Families struggling to get by on low-paying, no-benefit jobs can’t always make sound decisions about medical attention. Rather than spend what they don’t have going to a doctor for a minor injury or in the early stages of an illness, they wait until the condition is critical - and the care both unavoidable and costly.
By then, it can mean time off work - to heal or care for a family member - or, more likely, the loss of a job altogether.
Those complications only aggravate the crushing impact that medical bills have on a fragile household budget sustained by minimum-wage employment. What welfare reform may save in direct expenditures, shortsighted parsimony will squander in excessive social costs.
State lawmakers should expand the Basic Health Plan now. They’ll be glad they did in the out years.
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Doug Floyd/For the editorial board