This will serve to further class divide the USA.
Such things are very offensive to social-democrats. This is the opposite direction society should be going in.
Stuff is about to get worse for a lot of already hurting people. Guess what? Those who need help the least will get their incomes topped up, while the truly desperate and poor will suffer more. It's almost biblical... 'Do unto others'...we'll see who learns what in the next life...
Here is the article...
Unravelling the social safety net: Bush budget would overhaul Great Society
Posted on Sunday, February 09 @ 09:08:42 EST
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By Susan Milligan, Boston Globe
WASHINGTON - With little fanfare, President Bush has proposed a dramatic overhaul in the Great Society programs created in the 1960s to provide a safety net for the poor and the aged. His 2004 budget outlines a series of sweeping changes in social programs - from Head Start to Medicaid - that have long been targets of conservative criticism.
Bush's spending plan, which he submitted last Monday to the Republican-controlled Congress, would give the states more power in administering Medicaid, the health program for the poor, and in controlling Head Start, the preschool program for disadvantaged children.
The president's proposals for Medicare would encourage elderly beneficiaries to join health maintenance organizations. Among the incentives would be a prescription drug benefit, offered in exchange for patients leaving the traditional system subsidized by the government, which involves payments of separate fees for each given medical service.
These changes - if approved by Congress - could amount to the biggest revisions in social programs since Lyndon B. Johnson.
"It does stand out as ... a more radical change than anything we've seen in more than 30 years," said Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group.
"When you look at the budget," said Greenstein, the center's president, "you actually see it starts a process of gradually disassembling central features of core safety net programs, in particular those programs targeted at people with low incomes."
Medicaid, a $300 billion program, is now administered and partly funded by states, with federal matching funds. Under Bush's proposal, states would be given an early financial incentive to accept block grants for Medicaid, locking in a limited federal contribution.
In addition, lawmakers in both parties have proposed covering outpatient drugs under Medicare, an addition that alone would represent the biggest expansion ever of the $240 billion program.
The Bush proposal would offer the elderly drug benefits through Medicare only if they joined health maintenance organizations. Older people in some states have the option of enrolling in HMOs, but they have not been given benefit-related incentives.
The president's plan also would give state governments more control over Head Start, a $6.5 billion program that is federally funded but locally administered, and would shift federal oversight from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Education Department. States could combine Head Start funds with federal education funds.
Scott McClellan, a White House spokesman, said the changes had been designed to improve how the programs are run, a task that he said is better done by the states.
"The approach is to make these programs work better and to meet their goals, to make sure that we're achieving results in these programs," McClellan said.
Critics say that shifting authority to the states could lead the federal government out of the business of providing a social safety net for the needy and the sick.
Additionally, the critics say, program quality could vary widely across the 50 states.
The changes were suggested with little of the ideological head-butting that followed previous Republican efforts to revise social programs. Two days after Republicans won control of the House in 1994, for instance, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, then House Republican whip, gave a speech in Washington declaring that the "welfare state" programs had to be "thoroughly replaced." (The future House speaker later revised his remarks to say the programs should be reexamined.)
Opposition from President Clinton and interest groups blocked major changes.
Bush released his budget proposals last week without the bluster of the Gingrich era. Working with the Republican-controlled House and Senate, the president is well-positioned to push his agenda through Congress. And even longtime champions of programs like Medicaid and Head Start have acknowledged a need for some improvements. The administration's fixes follow conservative principles of limiting the federal role in social programs, giving more power to states, providing beneficiaries with more choice, and relying to a greater extent on market forces.
Conservatives outside the administration say the programs must be revamped to accommodate changes in the nation's economy and its demographics.
Liberals, meanwhile, say they are alarmed both by the proposed restructuring and by the pressure on the the federal budget. These they said, would spell disaster for programs for the needy.
"This is a very serious assault. Between privatization and the spending of the surplus, these programs could be in real tough shape," said Barbara Kennelly, a former Democratic congresswoman from Connecticut.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, meanwhile, said Bush's proposals would begin to unravel Johnson's antipoverty programs.
"I suppose the president's actions could be termed the end of the Great Society, and the beginning of the `You're on Your Own' society,' or the `Law of the Jungle society,"' the Massachusetts Democrat said.
"The administration," he added, "is using the budget to change the programs from basic entitlements to block grants, and is trying to privatize the delivery."
Analysts across the spectrum agreed that changes are needed to improve service and avoid waste. They differed on specifics.
"These are programs that really are in need of modernization, but not in the ways proposed by President Bush," said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, research arm of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council.
"We've always been opposed to block grants," Marshall said. "Simply dumping a bunch of money on states and saying `you figure it out' isn't good enough."'
The Head Start program suffers from a dearth of well-educated teachers, and youngsters in the program are behind in literacy and other areas. Medicaid is poorly administered in some states. Medicare costs are spiraling, and the program does not cover outpatients, whose use has grown considerably since the 1960s.
Bush's proposal for Medicaid block grants makes sense, said Daniel Mitchell, an economist with the conservative Heritage Foundation, because the grants would give government an incentive to budget frugally. Since neither the states nor the federal government pays for the whole program, each has an incentive to spend more, knowing another government will pick up part of the cost, Mitchell said.
Opponents say state governments will be tempted to take the deal, and then may be forced to reduce services and tighten eligibility later should the federal money prove insufficient to pay for health care for poor people.
"What the Bush administration is proposing is the policy equivalent of loan sharking. They dangle a relatively small amount of money to states that are in desperate fiscal condition, but the price they have to pay is exorbitant," said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a health-care advocacy group.
Head Start proponents agree that the program needs work. For example, only 20 percent of Head Start teachers have bachelor degrees, and even advocates of the programs say it sometimes serves more as a child-care service than as a program to boost development. But advocates say the budget would set Head Start on a road to becoming a state-run program with few federal standards. They also say states may neglect Head Start in favor of other education programs.
"We're eager to work on any reform that will work on the quality," said Amy Wilkins, executive director of the Trust for Early Education. "What we've got to be concerned about here is: Will the proposal serve children better?"
Critics of the Medicare proposal say seniors would be forced to join HMOs to get the drug benefit they have long sought.
"The whole idea is giving people choice. That's not ending it," said Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute. Medicare is a "social contract" with seniors that the government will fulfill, she said.
Others say the proposal is a step toward taking the government out of guaranteeing health care for the elderly.
When seniors have joined HMOs, providers have gradually pulled out because the reimbursement rate is too low, and elderly people might be left temporarily without coverage, said Elaine Kamarck, a health care adviser in the Clinton administration.
"This is a bait-and-switch operation," said Kamarck, now a lecturer at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "I'm a big supporter of shrinking government and using market forces, but in some cases, it doesn't work."
Greenstein sees the debate as part of a continuum in American politics, a moment potentially as significant as the New Deal in the 1930s or the passage of the Great Society programs themselves.
"Every several decades, we make fundamental changes in policy that set a mold within which government and a good part of American society operates for decades," Greenstein said.
? Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
Reprinted from The Boston Globe:
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/040/nation/
Bush_budget_would_overhaul_Great_Society+.shtml
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-I'd rather have a frontal lobotomy than a bottle in front of me
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