Healthcare cuts would mean higher costs and possibly deaths, officials warn

She had been born with AIDS, lived with it all her 24 years. She credits her survival to the state program that provides the expensive antiviral drugs she takes daily.

Now, with that HIV-prevention program facing the ax as California grapples with a $24-billion deficit, she came before a legislative panel today to plead for life.


"If these cuts take place, you're not just cutting money from the program -- you're cutting my life," said the woman, who gave lawmakers only her first name, Linnea.

"I choose to live," she said, her voice shaking and tears falling. "Please don't make me die. My choice is life."

Public health officials warned that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's effort to resolve the yawning budget deficit would halt medical insurance for more than 2 million Californians, sending them streaming into emergency rooms and costing the state billions of dollars for the more expensive care -- and potentially causing deaths.


Scores of patients and healthcare advocates told a 10-person legislative committee on the budget that in many cases the loss of state funding would mean an even bigger loss of federal dollars. A proposal to cut funding for family planning, for instance, would mean the loss of $9 in federal money for every $1 spent by the state, advocates testified.

In the worst cases, cuts from, or elimination of, some health programs -- such as Healthy Families and the state's poison control program -- would strip the state of its healthcare safety net and could result in the deaths of some patients who would not be able to get proper and timely treatment.

Michael Arnold, a representative of the California Dialysis Program, said the potential loss of that program would have two results for patients: "Either they die, or they show up at an emergency room for treatment."

David Welch, a California Nurses Assn. board member, said the results of the governor's proposed budget cuts would be "perfectly predictable": more people without care. More showing up at emergency rooms. And more dying.

If it eliminates healthcare for some its most vulnerable residents, he said, California will become "a contemptible society -- and a society that history will not judge kindly."

Schwarzenegger, a Republican, contends that the state's declining economy and plummeting tax revenues have boxed him into a corner, and that deep cuts are needed in health and welfare programs that have been the backbone of California's social safety net. Without those tough measures, the governor says, the state will cartwheel toward insolvency.

Some who testified pleaded for more revenue, ignoring the exhortations from Republican lawmakers to stand fast against tax increases as the state toils in coming weeks to balance its books.

"What I suggest is: Let's raise some revenue," said John Malone of the California Alliance of Retired Americans, adding that the state needs to boost taxes on alcohol, tobacco and residents with high incomes, and impose them on oil pumped from California soil.

Some simply pleaded from the heart.

James Nuñez, who has a developmental disability, told lawmakers that he worried about surviving without government help.

"I'm a human being like you," he said. "And I'm very, very scared."