Advocates of the Medicaid expansion, such as Bill Jordan of New Mexico Voices for Children, worry that the department will have to cut services to keep up with the enrollment demand. “Both of the proposed budgets have over $100 million of cost containment built in,” Jordan said.
Speaking after Cole on the panel of interested stakeholders was Bill Jordan of New Mexico Voices for Children, who drew the connection between struggling businesses and families in the state. “Families do well when we have stable, good-paying jobs,” he said.
Veronica Garcia, executive director of the advocacy group New Mexico Voices for Children, said research shows early childhood education programs benefit the economy in the long term. She also noted that the state regularly ranks near the bottom on child well-being.
Early childhood education and care move children out of poverty “as they transition into adulthood because children in these programs have better educational, intellectual and social outcomes,” said New Mexico Voices for Children Executive Director Veronica C. Garcia.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s annual Kids Count report has ranked New Mexico either last or next-to-last among the 50 states in child well-being for the past three years.
New Mexico Voices for Children became the latest group to criticize the diversion, saying the amount of money spent on it could better be spent in other ways in the state, citing a potential $1 billion cost.
While New Mexico’s poverty rate is slowly dropping, its still high enough to rank the second poorest state in the nation. And this year, the unthinkable nearly happened. As Stateline recently wrote, “New Mexico is close to overtaking Mississippi as the state with the highest percentage of its population living in poverty.”
Another study has found that the amount of uninsured New Mexicans fell since the passage of health care overhaul legislation. This time, the U.S. Census Bureau released data on Wednesday that showed the uninsured rate in New Mexico fell from 18.6 percent in 2013 to 14.5 percent in 2014, one of the largest drops in the nation.
Now is the time to reclaim our commitment to our children – enough is enough. It’s time we start re-prioritizing the issues we focus on at the Legislature. Our top priority must be our children – not wedge issues used as political fodder for the next election.
Gerry Bradley, a labor economist and policy thinker with New Mexico Voices for Children, said in an interview that over decades New Mexico’s economy has hardly changed. The types of jobs we have here and the proportions of our workforce in each job category barely budge. At the same time, Bradley said, demand for labor in New Mexico appears to be low. Low demand combined with an ill-equipped workforce, which Bradley blames on inadequate investment in human capital, gets you consistently low wages.