|
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Details of Cuts in Final Budget Reconciliation Bill
Below is a list of cuts in the budget reconciliation bill currently being debated on the Senate floor:
- Medicaid: Low-income families will have to pay more than they can afford for medical care under Medicaid and face shrinking benefits.
- SSI: People with disabilities will have to wait as long as a year to receive the back SSI benefits they are owed because the government has taken so long to approve their application.
- Child Support: Children will be deprived of $2.9 billion over 5 years/$8.4 billion over 10 years in child support not collected because of cuts in enforcement.
- Foster Care: Grandparents or other relatives in certain states will lose foster care assistance.
- Temporary Assistance for Needy Families: The agreement assumes that work requirements will be made more harsh and expects states to fail — and so estimates that states will pay penalties to the federal government. The Congressional Budget Office expects that states will in turn create harsher penalties for poor families, causing more to lose benefits.
- Child Care: CBO estimates that it will cost $12.5 billion in new funding to pay for the harsher work requirements and to keep up with the costs of providing existing child care. The budget deal only provides $1 billion — a gap of $11.5 billion. That means 255,000 fewer children will receive child care in 2010 compared to this year.
- Student Loans: Cut $12.7 billion over 5 years.
Posted by Adam Hughes
|