In July PHI surveyed the spate of state budget troubles that was then wreaking havoc with human services spending around the nation. A month later, the situation has not improved. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities updated its report on the state budget crisis on August 12, and ended the report’s first paragraph with this sobering declaration:

Most states have adopted budgets that closed the shortfalls they faced with a combination of federal stimulus dollars, service reductions, revenue increases, and funds from reserves. But these budgets are already falling out of balance as the economy has caused state revenues to decline even more than projected. States will continue to struggle to find the revenue needed to support critical public services for a number of years (“New Fiscal Year Brings No Relief from Unprecedented State Budget Problems“).

Stateline reported on August 5 that “record-low revenues forced many states to make cuts to their departments of health and to roll back policies and programs set up to keep people healthy and covered just as more people began needing those programs.” The bulk of these cuts, it said, fall on mental health, public health, and Medicaid providers.

Stateline detailed various cuts that are being made to health services in more than 15 states, including Minnesota, which is setting up stricter criteria for people to obtain the services of an in-home care worker; California, which is cutting back on in-home adult care; and Ohio, which has “drastically cut areas of their taxpayer-financed health system,” including nursing homes (“States make deep cuts to health“).

Here are snapshots of additional developments around the nation:

Colorado

On August 18 Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter unveiled his plan to fix a $318 million budget shortfall. The state has been operating without a budget in place since July 1, when its new fiscal year began. Denver Business Journal reported that three departments within the state government will bear the brunt of the cuts: corrections, human services, and health care policy and financing. Reimbursement rates for Medicaid providers, which went down 2 percent on July 1, will go down again, with medical providers receiving 1.5 percent less and mental health and developmental disability service providers receiving 2.5 percent less.

Pennslyania

The Pennsylvania legislature is stuck in budget gridlock as they seek to close a $3.25 billion deficit, and, as reported by the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, “State-funded mental health and physical disability assistance service providers say they are nearly broke and scared of looming budget cuts” (“Downtown rally tells of budget hardships under state impasse,” Aug. 18).

The paper reported on a protest held outside the State Office Building in downtown Pittsburgh by 125 people, many of them human services advocates. It spoke with 37-year-old Rob Oliver, who uses a wheelchair and works for the Disability Rights Network, and relies on a home care aide to help with daily tasks such as getting dressed. The aide works full-time for Oliver and is paid by a state-funded provider. Oliver told the newspaper that he fears having to enter a nursing home if the state money dries up.

California

In the wake of the state’s epic budget disaster, reports coming out of at least one county indicate that the expected painful cuts to services from California’s In-Home Supportive Services Programming are beginning to emerge.

“Home health care safety net unraveling,” says an Aug. 15 headline in San Luis Obispo County’s The Tribune. The newspaper reports that in a county where 1664 clients receive IHSS services, 457 of them will have their care reduced or eliminated by September because of $2.3 million in cuts to the program, the result of new rules imposed by the state budget cuts.

The Tribune says a “chronic shortage of residential nursing care and equally drastic budget cuts to outside services that assist individuals with disabilities” will likely result in program cutbacks that “will cross all demographic boundaries but will likely have a huge impact on seniors living on fixed incomes and parents caring for children with disabilities.”