Happy Mother’s day

I am so lucky. Two healthy kids (ok – they both have 102+ fevers right now, but HEALTHY in the biggest sense), loving and gentle partner, supportive families, cherished friends, plenty of food to eat, an ample home in a pristine natural setting, a community that is not in a war zone….. gheez. Oh yeah, and a irrevocable blog.

So, on this, my fourth mother’s day as a practicing mother, I am grateful. Countless moms are spending this day worrying about where to sleep tonight with their children, how to feed them the day’s meals, whether they can protect their little ones from a violent partner today, how to shield their kids from the random violence of war…… it’s excruciating just to imagine into.

Mothering is serious business. It’s not supposed to be convenient or painless. But it should be free of violence. For so many is it the opposite.

Might be the right day to join up or pony up with a donation to an organization that supports mothers in dangerous situations. Here are few to consider:

• Support Iraqi moms coping with war thru Codepink
• Support efforts to end domestic violence through the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
• Support the National Coalition for the Homeless in its work to end homelessness

cut, cut, cut

California’s poor are under attack. In response to a massive and looming state budget deficit, Governor Schwarzenegger is pushing a 10% cut to the Medi-Cal program. This would mean even smaller reimbursements to health care providers serving low-income people. Most medical providers who accept Medi-Cal already absorb substantial uncompensated costs for the care they provide to the state’s most disenfranchised residents. Further cuts will certainly mean decreased access to needed medical care for the state’s 6.5 million residents covered by Medi-Cal.

Fewer and fewer health care providers accept Medi-Cal due to the already low reimbursement rates that fail to cover the costs of their services. Many of these providers are community health centers that rely on additional donations, foundation grants, and creative fundraising efforts in order to just break even and generate the revenue needed to keep their doors open to low-income patients. Reducing reimbursements for practitioners means that some, if not many, will likely close their doors to Medi-Cal patients, leaving low-income folks with even fewer options.

Reducing access to preventive and routine health care services for those already in poverty can only lead to increased costs for the state down the road as:

• Medi-Cal recipients with shrinking access turn more heavily to costly emergency room care
• Require more expensive medical care for conditions that have advanced in the dearth of more timely medical intervention
• Increasing job losses result from insufficiently treated medical conditions
• Mental illnesses without supportive treatment become mental health crises resulting in costly hospitalizations, job loss, homelessness, child neglect, and violence – all of which cost the state money to manage
• Increasing housing instability and homelessness as the burdens of unpaid medical bills push low-income people with complex medical needs out of available housing options
• Greater reliance on entitlement programs as a result of increasing poverty and decreasing employability as medi-cal recipients’ health care needs find fewer available treatment options
• Increases in substance abuse as patients tend toward harmful self-medicating options in the face of decreasing access to needed prescriptions and health care

Once again, the heroic non-profits of the private sector are left with the challenge of providing for the basic needs of this country’s economically wounded…our friends and neighbors and fellow human beings who are hurtling through the expansive holes in our disappearing safety net.

The Governator’s proposed cuts to Medi-Cal are just this moment’s crisis in what is a continuous and extensively simmering emergency: the steady abandonment of a federal commitment to provide for the social welfare of Americans whose basic needs are unmet due to violence, mental illness, medical frailty, racism, and poverty. Many of these barriers could be ameliorated by a federally guaranteed system that ensured everyone access to basics such as health care (including mental health and chemical dependency services), affordable and safe housing, supportive education, quality childcare, and human employment paying a living wage. While our system maintains pieces of of some of these structures, they are disparate, deficient, and dwindling.