Republicans Big Budget Cuts? Eliminating Poison Control Centers
Eliminating nearly all the money for poison control centers would save $27 million — not even a rounding error when it comes to the deficit. Yet it is so foolish that it perfectly illustrates the thoughtlessness of the House Republican bill to cut $61 billion from the budget over the next seven months.When I was growing up there was a saying about the kind of meanness and spitefulness being displayed by the tea baggers inspired crop of House Republicans - cutting off your nose to spite your face. Republicans seem ready to cut anything and everything just to say they made cuts. It does not seem to matter whether those cuts will actually costs states many more millions in the long run.
The nation’s network of 57 poison control centers takes four million calls a year about people who may have been exposed to a toxic substance. In three-quarters of all cases, the centers are able to provide treatment advice that does not require a visit to a hospital or a doctor, saving tens of millions of dollars in medical costs.
While a single visit to an emergency room can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars (often paid for by the government), a call to a poison center costs the government only $30 or $40. A study in the Journal of Medical Toxicology estimated that the poison centers saved the State of Arizona alone $33 million a year. Louisiana eliminated its centers in the 1980s but restored them when it realized how much money they saved.
The centers, which collect poison reports, can also act as an early warning system for pandemics or large toxic exposures, allowing a quick response.
The federal government pays about 20 percent of the cost of the centers, with states, cities and philanthropy picking up the rest. Many strapped state and local governments have cut back their financing, and experts say that the virtual elimination of federal money would force many centers to close and sharply damage the effectiveness of the national network.
Could savings be achieved by consolidating centers? Possibly. House Republicans didn’t bother to examine that or how much the cuts would actually increase spending on emergency care. If they get their way, lines at emergency rooms will be longer.
We are a nation of laws. Then there is unhinged vindictiveness combined with ethnocentricity , Arizona GOP Bill Would Let Gov. Brewer Create An Armed Militia For Whatever She ‘Considers Necessary’
Arizona’s GOP-run legislature has taken to marginalizing and villainizing the immigrant population with zeal — be it through SB 1070, HB 2191, or SB 1070 “on steroids.” Now, the Pheonix New Times reports that state Sen. Sylvia Allen (R-AZ) is pushing a bill to give Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) a “blank check to establish a ‘state guard’ that would do her bidding, whatever that bidding might be.”There is the law and justice and than there is murder. Some Republicans apparently think murder is fair substitute for the rule of law.
Allen’s SB 1495 not only establishes a “state guard” independent of the national guard and finances that guard with national guard funding, but it allows Brewer to created this “Armed force” for “any reason the governor considers to be necessary”:
Given the current agitation within the state’s ad hoc militias, this GOP-generated “state guard” represents an official opportunity for anti-immigrant extremists already active in Arizona. Bill Davis, the neo-nazi supported founder of Arizona’s “border vigilante group” the Cochise County Militia, has been recruiting “combat veterans, with kill records, to camp out and patrol” along the U.S. – Mexico border. He also created a “private military company” to “stop border crossers” when the Border Patrol won’t. Shawna Forde, the vigilante leader of Arizona’s Minutemen American Defense, just received the death sentence for the murder of a 9-year-old Hispanic-American girl and her father.
