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Editorial: Stroking the rich, soaking the poor

Friday, March 4, 2005 | 9:03 a.m.

Since 1965 Medicaid has been a safety net for the country's low-income people. According to a report in The New York Times, it provides health insurance for 50 million Americans, pays for more than one-third of all births and finances care for two-thirds of nursing home residents. Owing to President Bush's tax cuts, however, the safety net could be developing some large holes.

Estimates show that if Bush is successful in making the tax cuts enacted in his first term permanent, government revenue will fall by nearly $2 trillion over the next decade. All the while he is pushing this plan for the wealthy, he is pushing equally hard to cut $60 billion from Medicaid over the next decade.

While Bush is focused on making the rich richer, his proposed Medicaid cut is forcing states to focus on ways of making the poor poorer. One suggestion is to force penniless Medicaid recipients to make co-payments, the way middle-class, insured people do when they visit a doctor. In our view, if the government has unlimited money to shower upon wealthy people, it would be immoral for it to skim severely limited money belonging to poor people. Bush's priorities are dead wrong.

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