Priorities, Please

Posted by John LaPlante in Health Care, Washington on Mar 17th, 2009 | no responses

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Brett Davis of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation points out that in the state of Washington, clean parks may be a higher priority than the public's health–at least if we look at which programs are being proposed for cuts and which are not.

"While litter might be unsightly, is it a higher priority than Basic Health and other state-provided human services? Lawmakers are currently engaged in "what-if" drills that would cut $2 billion from health and human services in the next budget…but leave Ecology's litter funding in place. Does that make sense?"

I'm not familiar with what Basic Health does, but it's possible that it's already over-reaching, and giving legislators an excuse to not do more to make health care and health insurance more affordable apart from government.

But if Basic Health is in fact a key priority for lawmakers, I'd agree that they should look at ways to save money from other departments. When it comes to parks, some public-private partnerships could help, as could some stepped up volunteer efforts by and financial contributions from groups of people who make the most use of them.

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