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Let folks fill out their own paperwork, save $200,000, Shea says
September 20th, 2008, 7:00 am · 4 Comments · posted by Teri Sforza, Register staff writer
Each week, The Watchdog asks this question of one elected official:
If you could cut one thing from the budget, what would it be and why?
OUR DISCLAIMER: The Watchdog does not agree or disagree with the opinions expressed by said elected officials; we simply serve as the conduit between you, the people, and the folks you have elected to represent you. As the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve!
Background on Irvine City Councilmember Christina Shea:
- Attended Glendale College before moving to Irvine in 1977, where she raised three children; earned a degree from Irvine Valley College, studied political science at Cal State Fullerton.
- First elected to council in 1992; has served as mayor and councilmember; now running against Sukhee Kang for mayor in November.
- Works as a Realtor and notary public, and runs Shea Consulting Group, which provides business development, government relations and political consulting services.
- Has served on the Orange County Republican Central Committee.
- Active in the American Cancer Society, Irvine Child Care Project, Human Options.
- For fun: reading, entertaining friends, exercising, and spending time with her seven grandchildren.
Q. WATCHDOG: Christina Shea, if you could cut one thing from the budget, what would it be and why?
A. SHEA: I would cut the I-CHP program (Irvine Children’s Health Program Initiative) proposed by Mayor Pro Tem Sukhee Kang. It costs about $200,000 (over two years), and pays consultants to go door-to-door to help lower-income people get their children signed up for almost-free healthcare from the state’s Healthy Families and other programs.
To spend money on this - in a year when we had to borrow $6.5 million from our reserves to balance the budget - just doesn’t seem right. And we might have to borrow again next year to balance the budget.
Healthy Families is one of the state’s great health care programs for lower income families. But people can go to a local agency in Santa Ana to fill out their own paperwork. Government, in my mind, should not be paying to have people filling out forms. I mean, when are we going to go out to our community and start fixing people’s washers and dryers? There has to be an element of personal responsibility. We shouldn’t be filling out their paperwork; this is the individual’s responsibility and would save the city $200,000. This is a waste of taxpayer money.
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Dear Ms. Shea,
Apparently you don’t understand what it means to be illiterate, culturally and literally, in this society. Which is sad, since you want to be mayor to people who are needy, as well as those who are wealthy and privileged.
Further, you apparently don’t understand that many of the families of those who are eligilble for the Healthy Families program have parents who work two or more jobs just to make ends meet, and so they can’t even GET to Santa Ana to fill out paperwork during office hours. I see this as a teacher, when parents can’t come for conferences because after they finish their job at Target stocking the shelves for you, they have to walk or ride their bike or take the bus to the Cheesecake Factory to clear yoru dinner dishes away.
Here’s a scenario for you, Ms Shea: one of your seven grandchildren is in a kindergarten class with a student who got his immunizations the day before, because his parents didn’t have health coverage and couldn’t afford to take him to the doctor until it was the absolute last minute. He actually has contracted a communicable disease before he got his shots, so he’s contagious. He plays closely with your grandchild, who goes home and plays closely with her unimmunized younger (let’s say infant) sibling. Now who suffers?
Think outside your sheltered box, Ms. Shea. Think about the big picture, which is the welfare of all of us. If you don’t like going door to door, then mail the paperwork. And quit showing your nasty, me-first attitude so blatently. It smells like Marie Antoinette’s famous (misattributed) recommendation for the starving peasants of France.
Whoa! Ms. Shea, I believe is correct. And if the others are unable to even ask for help, then , let them eat cake.
The I-CHP program focuses on helping uninsured families navigate a complex healthcare system and helps them enroll uninsured children into available and funded state health insurance programs that many eligible people simply don’t know about.
To implement the program, the City set aside $200,000 over 24 month period (that’s a two year period, not annually, hence Shea’s first misrepresentation). And the city isn’t spending anything until they incur service from the Children’s Health Initiative of Orange County — which means the program might even cost less.
Shea’s opponent, Sukhee Kang, is helping to defray the cost to taxpayers by going out and brought in local health foundation grants from the Kaiser Permanente, Bristol Park Medical Center, Irvine Health Foundation and the Cancer Center of Irvine in excess of $75,000 to participate with the City’s excellent program.
Funny, Shea didn’t mention two feasibility studies she pushed through that cost taxpayers more than $200,000. The studies looked into placing an overpass bridge in Irvine’s Grove neighborhood which has a lot of senior housing. It was opposed by Grove residents from the start and the issue consequently died while yielding no results.
And of course, as Mayor, Shea paid Arthur Anderson (the people who did the books at Enron) $75,000 for a feasibility study to place an NFL Team in a domed stadium at the Great Park site before the airport issue was even settled. And Shea got a nice trip to Charlotte, NC to see the new NFL facilities there as part of a fact-finding (let’s call it a vacation), forgetting that there are NFL franchises in San Diego, Oakland, San Francisco and Phoenix.
But cutting a program that help sneedy families get free healthcare for their kids in a program that’s already funded — there’s a word for that. It’s heartless.
Shouldn’t you note that Shea incorrectly stated the length of the program and the change was made by the editor here and not the candidate who misrepresented the length of the program?