Unacceptable Choices for Service Cuts

Kristina and I have both been blogging about budget cuts to human services programs in the U.S., some impending, and some becoming an actuality. The question of, "do we support the elderly or do we support children" literally came up at the town hall meeting I attended with my state officials earlier this month. The Salt Lake Tribune ran a story on exactly those choices being faced at a Department of Human Services meeting in Utah last Wednesday. From the story it sounds like preschools for autistic children won renewed funding, but Adult Protective Services, an agency that helps protect autistic adults (and and many others) from abuse by caregivers may have lost funding completely.

Choices like that--between educating children and keeping adults safe from abuse--are just... I can't even come up with words for how violating such choices are. Who gets to pass judgement on human beings like that? From the article, in the words of LouAnne Stevenson who is facing loss of necessary medical care, "You're cutting people's quality of life. We're real human beings here, we're not just another number."

Even if basic human rights are tossed out the window and financial costs alone are considered, cutting some programs may result in an even worse financial situation. This issue of sacrificing long term benefit for short term gain was also touched on at the Utah meeting,

Several speakers said the so-called savings would result in more costs in the future. For example, cutting 5,600 women from Medicaid-funded prenatal care could result in astronomical hospitalization costs, according to March of Dimes spokesman Stephen McDonald.

This sacrifice of the long term for the short term is deeply troubling to me as it could be argued that such thinking has contributed substantially to why we're in this economic (and environmental, and every other sort of mess) mess in the first place.

There has got to be a better way of dealing with the economic problems we face--a way that neither involves thrashing essential human rights nor ends up burying us deeper in the same mess we're already in. How do we find that way? How would things have been different at the Utah Meeting if the parents of autistic preschoolers and the self-advocates demanding freedom from abuse lobbied together to find a way to fund both the preschools and protective services? Will we find a better solution in time for it to make a difference?