COLUMBIA, S.C. | Lawmakers are considering cutting all services for nearly 26,000 people with disabilities as South Carolina’s state government tries to plug a $560 million budget hole.
Parents say the proposed cuts to day care programs and other services would force them to give up much-needed jobs to stay home and care for their offspring.
Andrew J. Imparato, chief executive of the American Association of People with Disabilities, said he is hearing horror stories about budget cuts across the country, but South Carolina is the most extreme example. Shutting down everything but federally required residential care is “the most draconian kind of thing I’ve heard,” he said.
Lawmakers say they have little choice. They are trying to close a shortfall in next year’s budget in a heavily Republican state where tax increases are not considered a viable option.
Mary Bennett, a single mother of three, said the budget cuts would mean sending her 11-year-old autistic son to an institution or giving up her job at a Columbia program that helps parents like her. Her son goes to public school a few days a week and a state-funded program cares for him the other days.
“He’s completely dependent on other people. He can’t do anything himself,” said Mrs. Bennett, 47. “I wouldn’t be able to work if they cut his services.”
The budget approved by a House committee last week would provide services only for 4,800 people with disabilities living in group homes or institutions, the only type of care the federal government requires the state to provide.
Theoretically, others who need help could move to those facilities, but there are only two open slots in the entire system and those are reserved for those most in need of care.
More than half of the proposed cuts in next year’s $5 billion budget - about $113 million in all - affect Medicaid and other human services programs. The state Department of Disabilities and Special Needs would see its funding slashed by $42 million, or 28 percent.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Cooper, a Piedmont Republican, said he is trying to find a way to soften the cuts, but there’s simply not enough money in other agency budgets to readily make up the difference.
House Minority Leader Harry Ott, a St. Matthews Democrat, railed against the proposed cuts, but doesn’t believe they are being used as bargaining chips to free up money elsewhere in the budget. They “just misread their numbers in their haste to get the budget out,” Mr. Ott said. “They just kept cutting and nobody really looked at the ramifications of what those cuts meant.”
Other states have raised taxes to deal with similar problems, but that’s unlikely in South Carolina.
“There’s just not a willingness to raise taxes in a Republican House,” Mr. Cooper said.
Other states, such as Oklahoma and California, are also cutting services for people with disabilities, but the changes are minor in comparison. Advocates say the South Carolina cuts are shortsighted because they eliminate early intervention programs that could help prevent more expensive problems down the road.
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