✂️ Entitlements Cuts & Social Safety Net — 5th Press Briefing Pt 2 — Ronald Reagan 1981 * PITD

Entitlements Cuts & Social Safety Net — 5th Press Briefing Pt 2 — #RonaldReagan 1981 * #PITD
November 10, 1981 Excerpt
Entitlements Cuts and the Social Safety Net

No, it isn't. And the main goal of any of these reductions is still aimed at correcting those abuses that come about through the interpretation of regulations, to allow people who do not have real need that justifies their imposing on their fellow citizens for sustenance, for them to still be able to take advantage of these programs. The person with real need, we still want to help.
At the same time, when you say to force someone to go out and seek work, I think that the whole target of some of our social reforms, like welfare, always should have been to find a way to salvage those people and make them self-sustaining, instead of perpetuating them unto the third and fourth generation as wards of the government. And let me just give an example here of the type of thing that goes on that has to be corrected.
We just recently received word of a little girl who has spent most of her life in a hospital. The doctors are of the opinion that if she could be sent home and receive her care at home, it would be better for her; this spending most of her life there and away from the home atmosphere is detrimental to her. Now, it would cost $1,000 a month for her particular ailment to send her home. Her parents have no way that they can afford that, and the regulations are such that Medicaid now cannot pay for that if she goes home. The alternative is Medicaid continues to pay $6,000 a month to keep her in a hospital, when the doctors say she would receive better treatment and be better off at home. But her parents can't afford to have her taken off Medicaid.
Now, by what sense do we have a regulation in government that says we'll pay $6,000 a month to keep someone in a hospital that we believe would be better off at home, but the family cannot afford one-sixth of that amount to keep them at home?
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I have to tell you that those, again, are going to be presented as options which will be considered in an upcoming Cabinet meeting, so I can't give you an answer on that yet.
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I feel that we have to look at these programs to see what we can do. But as I say, these will be presented as options that we have yet to go over and consider and see, make sure, that they're not going to unnecessarily hurt people that we don't intend to hurt.
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George, we'll be talking about whether there's going to be or should be any revenue changes in January, but also the entitlements. And it doesn't mean dropping them in any way. Those two will be presented in January with the budgeting process for '83, but those programs were never intended to go into effect until late in 1982 anyway. So even in January, we will be—if that is the route we take—they will be in time for when they were originally scheduled.
The problem has been, with the Christmas holidays coming, after all our discussions with our leaders in Congress, that we just can't produce or get anything done by Congress in this interim period. And so it's the best advice, that since they don't have to be set back by delaying their presentation until January, that's when we're going to do it.
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Well, we've got that 12-percent cut before them. They've got about 14 appropriation bills up there. Not one has come to my desk as yet. Now they're discussing a second continuing resolution of the kind that took us all the way through 1981, and here we go into 1982 and, as I say, we are waiting. Most of the appropriation bills that they're considering are above budget, the budget that we set. And as I've said, I will not stand still for budget busting bills.
But whether they send those up or whether, in this interim period, they send up another continuing resolution, I don't know. But if they do, I hope that it is within our budgeted figures. The first one was not, which means that they enforced spending through a continuing resolution that was above our budget.
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