So this is what happens when the budget cutter has a D next to his name (New York Post):
New York has few budget-busters as big as Medicaid, the health-care program for the “poor” that now covers one-fifth of all state residents at costs that have grown by fully 80 percent over the past decade — to a staggering $1 billion per week.
Amazing, then, that the task force appointed by Gov. Cuomo to rewrite the Medicaid rules may have come up with a formula that will finally begin to bring the program under control.
Consider: The plan cuts program spending by nearly $1 billion compared to the current fiscal year and some $2.5 billion from projected program growth for 2011-12.
More amazing still: New York’s health-care cartel — the hospitals and the health-care-workers union, which in the past have joined forces to make Medicaid matters worse — has signed on to this sweeping overhaul.
It “resulted in pain, but it was shared pain,” said George Gresham, president of Local 1199.
FYI, Local 1199 is New York City’s massive amalgamated health care worker union, part of SEIU. That they would have any role in helping bend down the Medicaid cost curve is a political earthquake of about 7.0 on New York’s political Richter scale.
Even better, the union and the hospitals took aim at the trial lawyers. As Bill Hammond explained in the New York Daily News, tort reform in medicine was so important to the industry that they gladly took a $2.3 billion cut as a trade-off.
The ink was barely dry on the proposals when Cuomo surgically implanted them in his budget and – get this – threatened a government shutdown if the divided and politically confused Legislature didn’t pass the whole thing by April 1 (NY Post).
The events in New York – as compared to, say, Wisconsin – are very, very revealing.
First of all, it provides an unexpected and somewhat painful example of how much partisanship matters today. When a Republican governor asks for structural reforms impacting a major faction of Democrats, the entire left mobilizes as if it’s 1968 all over again. Make the Governor a Democrat, and the wisdom of reform suddenly trumps political solidarity.
That one of the very unions leading the anti-reform charge in Wisconsin has manned the ramparts for (an admittedly different) reform in New York gives the (D) by Andrew Cuomo’s name all the more weight.
That said, it’s one thing to have a built-in political advantage for austerity; it’s quite another to use it, and Cuomo is using it big time – to the point of refusing to go along with his own fellow Democrats in the Assembly who are desperate to resurrect the “millionaire’s tax” (New York Post).
Now, Cuomo still has a ways to go here. The Democrats in the Assembly are not used to a political friend in the Governor’s Mansion telling them what they don’t want to hear. Meanwhile, no one really knows what will happen in the State Senate (where the majority Republicans are not known for limiting government spending). Still, he has already managed to flip the health care union, something few thought he could actually do.
If he really does pull all of this off, dissatisfaction with Obama and a Republican field looking increasingly stale could drag Cuomo the son where his father refused to go two decades ago – into a presidential campaign.
