Song in my head: Bush/Cheney's wrongs won't be forgot.... Each one we'll keep in mind.... These evil men must be locked up.....For all their many crimes..........................Mad Kane

Alter-Abled News

Oregon's poverty rate is skyrocketing. The Department of Human Services, who provides state run health care and food stamps is approximately 172 million in the red, 5 months after the new budget was implemented.

Oregon's biggest state agency has $172 million less than it says it needs, and closing the gap could force cuts in health care and other services to the poor, officials confirmed Tuesday. -LINK-

It will be the poor, alter-abled and the elderly who suffer.

It is astonishing and infuriating that a state agency could develop such a huge deficit only five months into a two-year budget. Yet legislators and taxpayers must not take their frustrations with the agency out on the people it serves. -LINK-

Apparently, economic forecasters assumed that the economic recovery period would boost the incomes of the state's neediest. Instead, more folks need food stamps, health care assistance and welfare is growing. And the jobs being created...suck. No health care, low wage service sector jobs.

State forecasters missed nearly 30,000 people -- or 7 percent of their caseload -- when they estimated how many Oregonians would qualify for government-paid health care in 2005-07, they acknowledged Wednesday.
That means the Department of Human Services will spend $100 million more for health care than it has in its two-year budget. That's the biggest chunk of the approximately $170 million gap in the department's budget revealed Tuesday.-LINK-