The mush diet
Idaho
college students may have to turn to a diet of mush to save enough money
to pay higher fees.
Mac ‘n’
cheese, long the stable of poor college students, is going to look like
haute cuisine after students get done paying higher fees approved by the
State Board of Education.
The elderly
poor who find themselves without teeth, courtesy of the Idaho Legislature,
could also be forced to turn to a mush diet just to survive.
The
let-them-eat-mush policies are the work of the Republican-dominated Idaho
Legislature.
The state’s
colleges and universities are canceling classes and programs to bring
budgets into line with $23 million cuts in state funding. Students and
their families also will have to pay between $50 and $330 more a year to
help the state make ends meet.
College
students and the elderly weren’t the beneficiaries of the $100 million
tax cuts the Legislature insisted upon maintaining. That money went
primarily to businesses and industry—whose executives won’t be dining
on mush.
The new
student fees are a double-whammy. Many student jobs—the first to go in
difficult economic times—already are casualties of the slow economy.
Even knowing this, the Legislature turned a cold shoulder to advocates who
pleaded the case for higher education.
Then, the
Legislature presented a heart of stone to the poor and elderly.
Chasing
savings of $7 million, legislators refused to fund basic dental care for
people on Medicaid—the sickest and most vulnerable Idahoans. They called
the cuts painful, but necessary.
They rolled
dental care back a hundred years. Their recommended method of addressing
an inflamed tooth? Extraction. And when the elderly have no teeth left to
pull? Dentures will not be an option. Gums will have to do.
The
Department of Health and Welfare told nursing home managers this month
that in cases in which patients cannot get dentures paid for by
Medicaid—they should be provided food that is ground, pureed or blended.
How
generous.
Maybe it’s
time for a grassroots initiative to require the legislators who approved
these policies to go on a liquid diet and to pay large monthly fees for
the privilege of sitting in those fat comfy chairs in the Capitol.
A few
gallons of pureed broccoli, a few pounds of ham paste and a pinch in the
personal pocketbook might convince them of the folly and cruelty of
policies like these.