Confronting Gov. Jon Corzine as he made his stop in Hudson County as part of his road tour to sell his $27 million in budget cuts to residents, local legislators continued to say Hudson County will be hurt.
In his various stops around the state, Corzine said he is determined to protect the state’s core responsibilities, such as education, public safety and care for the needy. But he has also said the state needs to get its fiscal house in order and noted that reductions in the state’s spending will not reduce the state’s $32 billion debt.
The state anticipates that the upcoming 2010 fiscal year budget already faces a shortfall of $1.7 billion.
“We need to pay down this debt sooner rather than later or else increased debt service payments will continue to crowd out funds for these core functions,” Corzine said in a release.
Former Assemblyman Louis Manzo disagreed, saying the nation is on the brink of a recession and this is the wrong time to be paying off debts.
“We should be paying off the debt during flush times, not lean times,” he said. “These proposals would only make the situation worse around the state.”
Assemblyman Anthony Chiappone said he also had concerns about the state budget cuts.
“As in the case of the of the City of Bayonne but on a much grander scale, the state faces a similar problem of spending more than it takes in and accumulating overwhelming debt as a result of borrowing and implementing ‘one time gimmicks’ to balance previous budgets,” he said.
Impact on local hospitals is a huge concern
Manzo, along with Assemblywoman Joan Quigley, said cutting Charity Care to hospitals will increase the healthcare crisis throughout the state.
“Seventy of the state’s 78 hospitals will go belly up,” said Manzo, who served on the Assembly’s Health Committee until he left office in January. “This is not to say all of them will go bankrupt. But most of them will think about it. But as many as 15 to 17 hospitals will close their doors.”
This means that areas around each hospital would be impacted by the loss of jobs as well as medical services, and will see an economic recession that will spread through the state.
Manzo said the state needs to do away with the current system of managed care and go back to a previous system that would be fairer to the hospital.
“Under his budget proposal, hospitals would lose $108 million in support for treating the uninsured,” Chiappone said. “With hospitals such as Bayonne Medical Center on the brink of collapse, I will emphasize that that funding to hospitals must be maintained. The Bayonne hospital loses about $3 million on the formula.”
State Senator Sandra Bolden Cunningham, a member of the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee, heard testimony today from representatives of municipalities, interest groups and organizations at a hearing held at the Rutgers New Brunswick campus earlier this year, and said the poor will face the greatest impact.
“Often when residents don’t have health insurance, they rely on Emergency Room doctors to serve as their primary care physicians,” she said. “Significant cuts to Charity Care combined with the increasing number of hospital closures would leave many residents in the 31st District and throughout the state without access to quality healthcare.”
Cunningham said the closing of Greenville Hospital will force residents to travel greater distances to get healthcare, something that will be repeated again and again across the state as hospitals close.
While Corzine’s budget helps some school districts, such as Bayonne, Chiappone and Cunningham are concerned about the $76 million in cuts to colleges.
“In my opinion, cutting the cost of higher education will cost us more money in the long run if our youth is unable to afford tuition and foregoes college. I will be fighting hard to keep this funding intact,” Chiappone said.
Cunningham concurred.
“In my district, there are four colleges,” she said. “The largest of the four, New Jersey City University, stands to receive a 10 percent reduction in funding from last year’s levels. The local community college, Hudson County Community College, could also see a reduction in funding. The ‘brain drain’ is a reality, and if we are not able to make college affordable for our students, we risk losing them for good.”