The Next Budgetary Killing Floor
A couple of things from Saturday's Star Tribune.
Item 1: Jean Hopfensperger's page one story on the state Medical Assistance program. She reports that MA "devours" 85 percent of Minnesota's Human Services budget, and that costs and demand are escalating. By 2004, 471,000 Minnesotans are expected to use Medical Assistance each month--that's roughly 10 percent of the state's population.
Item 2: On page one Metro, Governor-to-be Pawlenty squawks about the Minnesota Department of Health plan to collect private medical data, with patient names attached, in a giant state database. He professes to be troubled by the privacy implications. And they are troublesome, all right; the potential for commercial, employer, and government abuse of the information is enormous.
But Pawlenty and his crew have other reasons to want to suppress the collection of comprehensive public health information. When the bill for the state's self-imposed "austerity crisis" is coming due and you mean to put the screws to Minnesota's last major social spending program, what does it mean to start amassing data on public health? It means political embarrassment down the road, and not much more. So do away with it if you can, and then on with the night of long knives.
