Pain of ‘rein’ in budget
Gov to NYC: Slash Medicaid or pay up
Gov. Cuomo unveiled plans Tuesday to reduce the state’s looming $6.1 billion deficit by forcing New York City and other local governments to rein in Medicaid spending — or pay for it on their own.
Cuomo’s $178.6 billion budget plan also would slash nearly $2 billion in state aid to the city and the 57 other counties around the state.
Cuomo’s Medicaid proposal would only give them a 3 percent annual increase in their healthcare costs for the poor. After that, local governments would be on their own in terms of paying for any hikes, the governor said.
Currently, the state picks up the entire tab as part of a deal Cuomo struck in 2012 that caps propertytax increases at 2 percent a year.
Cuomo said the health-care change would ensure that local officials have “skin in the game” and don’t treat Medicaid spending as a
“blank check” from Albany.
He dangled an additional carrot in his spending plan, which is about 1.8 percent higher than last year’s budget. If the governments’ cost increases come in “below 3 percent, they get 25 percent of the savings,” Cuomo said during a news conference in Albany.
“So they have a financial incentive and a financial disincentive.”
Mayor de Blasio is “ready to fight” Cuomo’s plan, his spokeswoman said, noting that it would have cost city taxpayers $646 million last year, when the Big Apple’s spending on Medicaid increased by 7 percent.
“Whether it’s moms turning to our public hospitals for lifesaving breast-cancer screenings or firstgraders learning to read in our public schools, New Yorkers should not be held responsible for the state’s Medicaid gap,” spokeswoman Freddi Goldstein said. Cuomo said the state would slash at least $2.5 billion in annual MeMedicaid spending by having a tastask force identify industry inefficieciencies, as well as waste, fraud anand abuse, ahead of the April 1 bbudget deadline. The governor’s budget plan also calls for cutting $1.8 billion iin state aid to localities, includining by trimming planned incrcreases in education funding frofrom 4 percent to 3 percent. Underder the plan, annual funding for city schools would increase $321 million to $11.6 billion. Cuomo also announced a plan to replace the formula for education funding with one that’s “truly progressive” and favors poorer schools in favor of wealthier ones.
Anyone worried about New York’s fiscal health couldn’t have been terribly reassured by the $179 billion budget Gov. Cuomo rolled out Tuesday.
Cuomo called for no major tax hikes and kept the uptick in state operating costs to 1.9 percent. Good. Yet the plan left many details under wraps. And its broad strokes are themselves hardly comforting.
Start with the budget hole Cuomo needed to close — $7 billion, the Citizens Budget Commission says. The gov would plug that with $2 billion via a higher estimate of tax receipts, $2.5 billion in Medicaid savings and $2.5 billion in other various trims.
Yet he left numerous details about that unanswered, not to mention how he’d deal with mammoth future-year gaps.
And his plan pushes off payment yet again (and possibly permanently) of $1.7 billion in Medicaid bills that were quietly snuck into this year’s budget from the year before — a move experts see as reckless.
He also wants local governments, like New York City, to pick up the tab for Medicaid spending that tops a 3 percent growth cap, even though the state sets most of the basic rules for Medicaid.
Cuomo has until April to hammer out a final plan with the Legislature; expect lawmakers to push for even greater spending.
Finally, the gov yet again plans to ram into a budget deal a host of new laws that have little to do with the budget. As for the one item that needs urgent attention — the bail-reform laws that have put public safety at risk — he didn’t say how he’d fix them.
Yet fixing those “reforms” should come even before a budget deal, as New Yorkers increasingly believe: With dangerous suspects being released nearly daily as a result of the reforms, a Siena poll Tuesday found only 37 percent of voters now favor them, down from 55 percent in April.
Alas, the state budget isn’t the only thing New Yorkers have to worry about.