I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
New Mexico built its current state budget on the assumption that Congress would extend stimulus funding for Medicaid through the end of the fiscal year, next June. Right now the extra funding ends Dec. 31, 2010.
Sen. John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, told The Independent he’s already preparing for the possibility that Congress, even if it acts, won’t cover the full $160 million the state budgeted in anticipation of the federal dollars.
But in Georgia, Gov. Sonny Perdue has already ordered leaner state agencies to cut another 4 percent in spending starting next month because the state’s new budget relies on federal stimulus dollars that might not come, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting.
So far Congress hasn’t acted, leaving New Mexico, Georgia and two dozen other states that assumed the extra federal dollars would arrive in a potentially worse financial trouble.
In other words, New Mexico’s $160-million budget gap could grow to $320 million if Congress doesn’t act. The New Mexico Legislature anticipated the arrival of $160 million in the extra Medicaid dollars in this year’s budget.
Georgia’s budget hole is larger—some $375 million, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—and the cuts are spread far and wide.
Georgia’s governor exempted K-12 schools from the latest cut, but not the university system, the Atlanta paper said.
The latest cut “will affect agencies that hand out driver’s licenses, educate college students and run parks, prisons and health care programs that cover more than a 1 million Georgians. Those agencies employ about 90,000 people,” the Atlanta paper reported.
The cut is expected to save Georgia $25.5 million per month, the Journal-Constitution quoted the Georgia governor’s office as saying.
While Georgia is acting as if the federal dollars don’t arrive, New Mexico has yet to make decisions on what to do in event of a worst-case scenario — that no extra Medicaid dollars come down.
“There’s a lots of conversation going on,” Betina Gonzales McCracken of the New Mexico Human Services Department told The Independent on Friday.
McCracken’s boss, Human Services Secretary Katie Falls, has explained the situation to three different interim legislative committees this summer, so lawmakers know what’s going on, McCracken said. State officials also are working closely with New Mexico’s congressional delegation in Washington to keep tabs on the issue.
“We’re discussing this and trying to figure out what difficult decisions we may have to make,” McCracken said of an ongoing dialogue between the Gov. Bill Richardson‘s administration and state lawmakers.
“Maybe Congress does come up with the funds,” McCracken added. “If it happens before November, then that will help tremendously.”
But at some point the state will have to alert the hundreds of thousands of New Mexicans who rely on Medicaid that their services might change if Congress doesn’t act before sometime in November.
“We can’t wait ’til the end of the year,” she said.
Even partial Medicaid funding would mean a big loss for New Mexico, McCracken said.
Hundreds of thousands of New Mexicans rely on the government program. The state already is looking at ways to trim the program’s costs in the years before 2014, when the nation’s new federal health care law picks up nearly all of New Mexico’s Medicaid costs.
