Republicans plan on cutting $13 billion in Medicaid and foodstamps...

[kentuck]

If the people really knew what was going on, every one of these people would be run out of town on a rail. Ignorance is salvation for Republicans.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/opinion/14wed2.html

<snip>
President Bush's vow to speed welfare assistance to the victims of Hurricane Katrina overlooks the gruesome determination of many Republican Congressional leaders to make $13 billion in cuts for Medicaid and food stamps. They quietly plan this even as they throw short-term emergency money at the crisis.

Sustaining their health and income is vital to the storm's impoverished survivors now and well into the future. But the most basic cuts in antipoverty programs are planned for enactment later this month by the same Republican majorities that approved the president's upper-bracket tax cuts and created deficits for a generation to come.

Congress's budget hawks are clearly hoping that the cacophony of sympathetic speechifying about the storm victims will distract the public from these cuts and from the fact that they will land heavily on the three states most devastated by the hurricane, where roughly one out of three children were already dependent on Medicaid.

Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, the former Republican national chairman, personifies his party leaders' contradiction in begging for emergency aid now after having championed painful cuts in the social safety net. Until recently, Mr. Barbour has been in the spotlight as his state's unapologetic Medicaid antagonist. Rejecting the alternative of a tax increase, he severely cut drug benefits. And before the courts intervened, he had sought to drop 65,000 poor, elderly and disabled people from the program.

...more

[unrepuke]

1. The large print giveth and the small print taketh away

[mtnester]

2. How helpful

:sarcasm:

[Beetwasher]

3. Sick, Demented, Heartless Bastards

That's what it takes to be a Repub these days. Sheer, unabashed, cruel and malicious deviousness.

[pop goes the weasel]

4. DUers need to stay on top of this

People will die because of Medicaid cuts. They will die isolated, unnoticed by the press, but they will die. The cuts to Medicaid are another Katrina aimed solely at the nation's poor and disabled.