How will GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's budget plan — already passed by the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives — affect Missouri?
Nonpartisan analysts agree its new round of deep cuts will force our seniors to pay more for health care, slash programs that now help our schoolchildren and college students and gut aid to low-income Missourians and the nonprofits that help them.
How?
You'll need to be 67 to get Medicare, which, in 10 years, will no longer be guaranteed. Seniors will get vouchers that will cover only part of private health plans. Each Missouri senior will have to find $6,000 more each year just for what Medicare now covers.
In 2010, MO HealthNet — our Medicaid — paid for 61 percent of all nursing home care in Missouri for many middle-class and lower-income families' elderly relatives and more than 160,000 blind and severely disabled Missourians. Today, more than half of MO HealthNet funding comes from Washington. Ryan's planned one-third cut to Medicaid in just 10 years would strip support for Missouri's hospitals and over half a million of our children.
People are also reading…
The Affordable Care Act would be repealed, raising prescription drug costs for Missouri seniors, ending free preventive cancer and diabetes screenings and young adults' legal right to stay on their parents' health plans until age 26.
Starting in 2014, under Ryan's plan, there will be 3,679 fewer Head Start openings in Missouri. Our schools will lose over $88 million in federal funds for programs that serve disabled and low-income youngsters. Pell Grants and federally subsidized college loans will get huge cuts.
Last year, Missouri's poverty rate was 15.4 percent, higher than 31 other states. So we will also get huge cuts in food stamps, heating and cooling assistance and poor children's school meals. The drop in food aid alone will hurt 994,000 Missourians.
Federal aid to Missouri's state and local governments will plunge by more than a billion dollars, to intensify the budget crunch already confronting Missouri cities, towns, counties and our state government. Our state budget must balance. So they would have to find a way to make up many millions of lost federal dollars each year — or take funds for the highways, bridges, fire, police, jobs, education, health and housing on which millions of us depend.
Will all this suffering balance the federal budget? The Ryan Plan cuts $4.3 trillion in federal spending. It also adds $4.2 trillion of new tax cuts that mostly benefit few very wealthy Americans. Millionaires will have their taxes slashed by an average of $250,000 a year on top of the big Bush-era tax cuts they already enjoy, while many middle-class Missouri families will get bigger tax bills.
Nonpartisan number crunchers like the Congressional Budget Office found the Ryan budget plan will mean federal deficits at least until 2040. That's hardly a blueprint for deficit reduction. Rather, it is a plan to gut programs most Missouri families need, to pay for more tax cuts for a few very wealthy people, who mostly live in other states.
David Robertson is a professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and Theda Skocpol is a professor at Harvard University. They are members of the Scholars Strategy Network, which brings together many of America's leading policy analysts to address pressing public challenges at the national, state and local levels.
