Deukmejian’s Health Care Budget Cuts Feared by Poor

Esther Alvarez considers a move to a nursing home a death sentence.

It is a life style she tasted last fall when she fell and broke her hip. For 30 days, she recuperated in a convalescent home, and nearly ever day she cried.

“At home I feel alive,” Alvarez said. “But at that nursing home, I felt dead.”

Alvarez, 62, and her 86-year-old husband now live in the Santa Ana home of their daughter, and the family receives a monthly check from the state to help pay the costs of caring for the elder Alvarezes.

But Esther Alvarez, who has suffered two strokes and is confined to a wheelchair, worries that her daughter won’t be able to afford caring for her anymore.

Governor George Deukmejian’s proposed budget for 1989-90 would cut $485 million from health and welfare services. Among those programs marked for reductions are the In-Home Supportive Services Program, which the Alvarezes receive, Aid to Families With Dependent Children, Planned Parenthood and Indigent Medical Services.

Swollen State Budget

The governor defends the proposed cuts as necessary to balance the swollen state budget.

However, the Democrat-controlled Legislature will have a chance to propose changes in the budget during upcoming hearings in Sacramento. The final budget won’t emerge until after the governor has had a chance to blue-pencil the changes adopted by state lawmakers.

County and private health care advocates, however, fear the consequences.

“I just wonder how many more people this will push over the edge and into the streets,” said Jean Forbath, director of Share Our Selves in Costa Mesa, which gives food and medical aid to the poor. “A lot of people in this county are trying to make a go of it. But holding a steady job in a place like Orange County doesn’t guarantee a roof over one’s head or a hot meal 3 times a day.

“It’s expensive to live here,” she said, “and those programs are critical to a lot of people.”

Until last August, Alvarez and her husband, a retired construction worker in poor health, lived by themselves. The $548 they receive from the in-home services program was used to hire an attendant to help the couple cook, clean and shop. But under the program, the couple could pay only minimum wage. And the state restricted the number of hours funded to 79 a month.

None of those hired lasted long.

“It boiled down to finding someone willing to work part time for minimum wage,” said Alvarez’s daughter, Rosie Griggs. “Under those restraints, it’s tough finding quality help.”

Frustrated by the turnover in help, Griggs and her husband moved the couple to their home. “It just seemed like it would be easier this way,” she said.

For a time, Griggs managed to juggle her family, including a 7-year-old son, her job at an electronics firm and her parents. Then her mother broke her hip, and Griggs struggled with the load. When her mother returned from the convalescent hospital just before the holidays, Griggs took a medical leave from work to be at home more.

She returned to work just last week.

“We’re luckier than most,” Griggs said. “We have enough money to cover whatever the state cuts. And my mom and dad have a home here for as long as they want.

“But what about those that don’t have a cushion, or family to lean on. What are they going to do?”

The way Leroy Hinkley figures it, the state’s in-home services program has given him a few extra years with his three “kids.”

The kids are Wolfer, Tippy and Johnny: a pit bull, collie and a mutt. And his home is a white clapboard house on Main Street near 17th in Santa Ana, where he has lived since childhood.

Now 80, Hinkley is in failing health. He has diabetes and his hearing is failing. He moves slowly, relying on his rusted metal walker.

Though social workers say he would be better off in a home with 24-hour medical care, Hinkley, who never married, has refused to leave the dogs.

“You can’t abandon your family,” he said as Wolfer begged Hinkley to play ball, circling the room clenching a semi-deflated volleyball in his teeth. “You can’t find this kind of friendship in one of those fancy homes for old people.”

Because of his age and health, Hinkley can’t adequately care for himself.

In recent years, he has used the $335 he receives from the in-home services program to hire outside help. But, as many of the 4,500 county residents in the program have found, it has never been enough money to keep anyone more than a month or two. And the governor’s budget would cut $50 from that $335.

“Being able to stay home has meant a lot to Leroy,” said Carol Bade, a social worker at VIP Center, the adult day center where Hinkley goes several days a week. “The state has given Leroy that chance to be happy in his older years.”

As a teen-ager, Yvette Bennett promised herself she would not end up on welfare like her mother.

Bennett grew up in Sunset Beach, the oldest of five children. Her parents divorced when she was 13, and her mother raised the children without support from their father, Bennett said.

Despite her pledge, Bennett’s life has nearly mirrored her mother’s.

“I don’t like it, but I’m a welfare mother,” said the 28-year-old Bennett, a Huntington Beach High School graduate, who notes proudly that she is a fourth-generation Orange Countian.

She married young, then divorced 4 years ago, gaining custody of her 5-year-old son but no financial support from her former husband. To pay rent and buy food, she worked during the day as a nurse’s aide at a convalescent home and at night as a clerk at a 7-Eleven.

Between the two, she made “good money,” but worried that she never saw her son.

“He would complain to me, ‘Mommy, I never see you. I miss you.’ It tore me up,” Bennett said. “I became depressed and friends told me to quit work and go on welfare. . . . I resisted for a while, but then I decided my son was more important.”

Last June, as a single mother with a child, she qualified to receive $535 a month through the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. She joined about 55,000 other county residents in the program, many of them like her, single and unemployed with children.

Bennett moved to Anaheim and rented a one-bedroom apartment for $525 a month. She also began receiving $87 a month in food stamps.

At first, Bennett made a go of it, but by November she couldn’t pay the rent, and on Christmas Eve, she was evicted. She sold her furniture, and has been living with family and friends since.

“Let’s face it, I’m poor. And some of this is my own doing,” Bennett said. “But I’m trying. I’m not lying in the gutter. I want to work and I want stay in Orange County. . . . But sometimes, I don’t know if I can.”

Jean Shanks was going to high school in New Mexico when she first went to Planned Parenthood for advice and protection.

“I was 15 and becoming sexually active,” recalled Shanks, now 32 and living in Orange. “For $3 I got an examination, some advice and a supply of birth control pills. It was reassuring.”

In December, 1987, two weeks after Shanks and her family moved from Albuquerque to Orange County, she again found herself in a jam. Her husband, a construction worker, had been hit by a truck on a job site and seriously injured. Shanks, a legal secretary, had not yet begun to look for work and her birth control prescription was nearly gone.

“I remembered Planned Parenthood so I went to the local office,” she said. “I had $7 in my purse and that was it.”

It was enough. She received an examination and a new prescription, services that would have cost more than a $100 from a private physician.

A recommendation to eliminate state money for family planning agencies would save an estimated $36 million a year, state officials say.

About 31,000 low-income women in Orange County visited family planning clinics in 1988.

“I would have been up a creek if they hadn’t been there,” Shanks said. “It seems to me it would be a whole lot cheaper to help women get protection from pregnancy than helping pay for an unwanted baby.”

Maria Elena Romo has a weak heart.

Romo, 57, who lives with her daughter in Costa Mesa, has been hospitalized 3 times in recent years for heart complications, the last time in December at Hoag Memorial Presbyterian Hospital in Newport Beach.

Her medical treatment and medicine are paid by the county’s Indigent Medical Services program, which serves 12,000 county residents. But a proposed $333-million cut in state funding for such programs would mean Romo could only get help if she became critically ill.

“Maria Elena could only qualify for help if her heart failed,” said Vicki Mayster, a health official at the Share Our Selves medical clinic, where Romo receives treatment. “It would have to be a matter of life and death before the state would probably step in under the proposed budget reductions.”

Romo, who raised nine children in a Mexican border town, said the program has kept her alive.

“It has let me be with my children and grandchildren and I am thankful.”