-- Gov. Jim Doyle sat down with reporters today to reiterate his budget wish list and ladle some criticism over the GOP-dominated committee’s handling of the bill. Doyle said his door has been open to meet with the legislative leaders, Assembly Speaker John Gard and Senate Majority Leader Dale Schultz, to cultivate common ground, but he sounded as if the discussions have fallen on deaf ears.
“There have been some real differences in priorities expressed so far,” the governor said of the Republicans budgeting strategy. “They have been choosing nursing home operators over nursing home residents … They are choosing doctors over patients, and they are choosing huge construction projects over school children.”
The Dem governor outlined to members of the Capitol press corps his five budget priorities, principles he has held to tightly since introducing his budget in February; fund 2/3 of education costs, expansion four-year-old kindergarten, expansion of the SAGE program, protection of health care and Medicaid funding, and the protection of shared revenue. “I want a property tax freeze that is responsible, and in order to do that there has to be funding for police and fire protection,” he explained.
Doyle said he hasn’t heard from Commerce Secretary Mike Morgan since Friday’s tax filing deadline, but he isn’t expecting a dramatic surge in revenues beyond the guideline he used in conceptualizing his budget. “As I said, it seems to me anything we do have should be going towards making sure we cover Medicaid,” he said.
Doyle was skeptical that Republicans could fill in the hole in Medicaid funding they’ve made by rejecting his proposed $180 million from the Patients Compensation Fund, which he said is needed to cover a one-time hole caused by pulled federal funds. He said the PCF is over-funded by several hundred million dollars. “At what level does that fund get before somebody decides they’re going to choose the patients needs first? When it hits a billion dollars, or a billion-and-a-half or two billion dollars?”
Doyle said the finance committee better not try to take money from education to pay for Medicaid. “I will fight them if they tried to pass a budget that robbed education to pay Medicaid,” Doyle said.
Doyle said he’s been very upfront about his budgeting process, but poked the Republicans for what he insinuated were secret dealings. “So now it’s their turn to proceed, and what we’ve seen in the last couple weeks isn’t very encouraging. We’ve seen a lot of closed-door meetings, we’ve seen weekend conference calls to avoid the press and the public, and last week we saw an unprecedented joint caucus meeting of both houses of the Legislature totally closed to the media.
“They’ve also rejected using the Patients Compensation Fund, they’ve indicated they won’t use proceeds from revenue bonds to make investments in community based options for people. Together that amounts to $300 million that at this point they say they are not going to use. That $300 million leverages 400 million in federal Medicaid dollars, so what they’re talking about would be a $700 million hole in the Medicaid budget without giving any indication of how they’re going to pay for it, what services they’re going to cut, who they’re going to cut off Medicaid or how they’re going to make up the difference.
“I’ve been very clear about the choices I’ve made to balance they budget, I challenge the Legislature to do the same,” Doyle said. “If they’re going to put a $700 million hole in the Medicaid budget, then they’re going to have to come forward and say how they’re going to fill it.”
The governor boasted about his belt-tightening measures in this budget. “You’ll never hear people criticize me about not making deep enough cuts because we made them for the second straight budget,” Doyle said.
Doyle bristled a bit at the Republican criticism of the $1.1 billion structural deficit built into his budget. “You know, these guys objecting to structural deficits after the ones they rang up – this is less than half of what structural deficit was two years ago, it’s a so-called structural deficit that represents about 50 percent of what the projected revenues are over those two years. We have made enormous progress in dealing with the structural deficit in this state, and we have done by the kind of cuts I’ve made in the state operations fund.”
Doyle said his bonding proposal to shift resources into community-based alternatives for long-term care will reduce the number of people living in nursing homes, which he said is a major drag on Medicaid funds. Touting his plan to reduce the number of people living in nursing homes by 25 percent over the next eight years by moving them into community-based living arrangements, Doyle also ripped Sen. Mary Lazich for her “unbelievable” remark that nursing home residents were “coffin bound.” “That’s the response we’ve had to what is a very meaningful proposal of ways to try to deal with the ongoing loss of long-term care. We’ve never heard Republicans say a word about the issue, but this is what is driving Medicaid costs across the country,” Doyle said.
The governor was non-committal about how he might use his veto pen once he gets his bill back, not even saying he would line item parts to achieve his prized two-thirds funding for education. “I don’t know what will be in front of me, I don’t know what my veto options will be and I’ve really been pretty careful not to talk in the broad sense about what I’ll veto because I’ll get a big complicated budget package that will come to me, I understand that. And I understand it’s not going to be a 100 percent of what I want and I’m going to have to accept some things I don’t want,” he said.
Doyle sounded flexible on some pieces of the budget. While he said he would line-item some particular portions, like if the JCF deiced to eliminate four-year-old kindergarten, most sections are negotiable. “When you get into discussions of what the level of funding is, those are all things you can talk about and work through assuming you’re meeting the basic priorities I have here,” he said.
