Missouri house committee passes budget to the floor

Democrats' main complaint has to do with lack of health care funding.

By Greg Young

Published March 12, 2009

The Missouri state budget passed through the House Budget Committee on Wednesday night and will now move to the House floor.

Committee members heard about 100 amendments to the initially presented budget by House Budget Committee Chairman Allen Icet, R-Wildwood. The hearing, which ended at around midnight, left both sides satisfied with parts of the budget and frustrated with other sections, which was divided and passed as 13 separate bills.

One area both sides were generally happy about was the funding for higher education, which remained stagnant and restored the funding that had been cut from the University Hospital.

The bill means that Gov. Jay Nixon will be able to keep a recent promise he made to presidents of Missouri colleges and universities that if they didn't raise tuition, he would not decrease state funding.

Additionally, the budget avoided cuts to the Access Missouri and Bright Flight scholarships.

But Democrats, including House Minority Floor Leader Paul LeVota, D-Independence, said he didn't agree with the fact that the higher education bill left out the Missouri Promise and the Caring for Missourians, two programs Nixon has proposed.

"I'm not sure why anyone would support this," LeVota said.

Other promises that Nixon made will not be kept if the budget stays in its current form, most notably his promises for health care expansion.

While on the campaign trail, Nixon promised he would restore health care eligibility to 80,000 Missourians, but in the proposed budget by Icet, there would be cuts to Medicaid funding.

Icet said he was "happy" with the bill that sets allocations to the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Health and Senior Services, and said Democrats wanted to expand "welfare" in the state by adding Missourians to the Medicaid rolls.

"My argument is the more people we put on, the sooner we have to cut because it will bankrupt the state," Icet said.

Democrats on the committee, including Rep. James Morris, D-St. Louis, criticized the cuts to health care.

"The voters of Missouri spoke clearly that we would expand children's health insurance," Morris said. "For the chairmen to disallow that slaps in the face of human decency."

Also at issue is how the stimulus funds should be used in the budget. Icet and the Republicans generally have argued the stimulus funds should not be placed in the budget and instead should be passed in separate bills.

Icet said this is because the stimulus funding should be used for short-term projects. However, Icet used $329 million of stimulus funds in the budget.

Icet said if they hadn't appropriated that money directly, they wouldn't have the ability to access that money in the future.

"If I did not do what I did, I don't think we would have been able to access that money," Icet said.

The entire House is likely to hear bills on March 23, after the spring recess. Democrats said they would propose amendments to the bill regarding health care on the floor.