Wednesday, January 31, 2007 the Health and Human Services Appropriations Subcommittee will be accepting public testimony. Sign up to provide testimony and come and help us convince them that they need to end the atrocious waiting list. Some individuals have waited more than a decade for services and their situation is desperate.

Call, write, email (or better yet do all three!) members of the Health and Human Services Appropriations Subcommittee to let them know that they need to fund the waiting list, vision and dental services, support Senator Mayne's bill to have nursing home money follow individuals into the community and efforts to prioritize community-based long-term care funding over nursing home care. A list of these legislator is below, along with a link to the legislative web site that will allow you to look up the needed email and physical addresses, along with phone numbers.

It appears that the legislature will be imposing a 5% growth cap on Medicaid that came as a recommendation from the Medicaid Interim study committee. One aggravating factor in this is that this has been adopted with no discussion, no debate and no public input. It also singles out one among all state or state and federally funding programs for this kind of arbitrary cap. A third problem is that is indiscriminantly limits growth and may do so in ways the severely harm people, such as once again failing to fund vision and dental services, while once again insisting that Medicaid purchase brand-name drugs so that the pharmaceutical companies can continue to reap high profits from Medicaid dollars. Please write or call members of the Executive Appropriations Committee and the Health and Human Services Subapporpriations committee, asking or demanding that they limit growth through efforts that won't harm Medicaid beneficiaries, such as supporting the Preferred Drug Plan and that in this time of unprecedented surpluses with the need to catch up from so many years of neglect that we not arbitrarily limit Medicaid growth. We need vision and dental, we need fair reimbursement for medical provides so they will be willing to treat us and we need an end to waiting lists!