The Other Cost of this Delay
Carol Marin covered the sad shape medical providers are in who depend upon state payments:
On Monday night, on WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight,” State Rep. Patti Bellock, a Republican from Woodridge and a member of the House Impeachment Inquiry, put a spotlight on it. Bellock said that while Blagojevich fiddles with the feds, a state of crisis is building in this state when it comes to critical health care and health providers.
Bellock said a doctor called her office six weeks ago. “She was in tears” saying the state was $200,000 behind in Medicaid payments to her family clinic and that soon they may have to close their doors.
When that call came in, Bellock said, she called Blagojevich’s office. “It was two days before the governor was arrested,” Bellock recalled later. “I talked to one of his aides” but the aide quickly quit or took a leave of absence after his boss was taken into FBI custody. Just one of too many examples of how state government has been frozen by this scandal. “The chain of communication is broken,” she said.
Another of Bellock’s regular calls comes from the COACH Care Center in Naperville. COACH stands for Coordinating Action for Children’s Health.
“We take care of medically fragile children,” CEO Debbie Grisko said by phone Tuesday. “Children with trachs, ventilators, feeding tubes.”
Seventy-eight percent of Grisko’s clients live at or below the poverty level — families from Champaign to the Wisconsin border, who can’t keep their kids in hospitals forever and who need help learning how to care for them at home.
“Our bills are five months behind in being paid,” Grisko said. And the irony, she points out, is that her agency estimates it actually saved the state $4.6 million in the last year by helping children transition into home care and out of more expensive facilities.
We are looking at almost another month by most estimates and then we will have Pat Quinn trying to move quickly to transition into power, and then time for any solutions to work their way through the House and the Senate which also has a new leader (that’s a good thing in this case).
It should not take 2 months to get rid of a Governor caught on tape selling state resources for bribes. Taking 2 months in the middle of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression is unbelievably stupid especially when he has been the barrier to passing decent solutions.