Corporate Tax Cuts and the Spread of Tuberculosis in Florida

When they weren't making it more difficult to register voters and requiring women to have unnecessary ultrasounds before deciding to have an abortion, Florida?s Republican legislature handed out billions of dollars in special interest tax breaks and plugged the resulting budget gap, in part, by eliminating over 1600 jobs in the state's Department of Health.

However, budget cuts do not exist in a vacuum. These programs have a purpose, and without them real people suffer real consequences. In the state of Florida, according to a shocking report by Business Insider, budget cutbacks led directly to the state ignoring a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report of a tuberculosis (TB) outbreak in Florida, the worst in 20 years.

In April of this year, the CDC sent a letter to Florida health officials warning of a tuberculosis outbreak in a Jacksonville, Florida hospital that had led to thirteen deaths and nearly 100 additional 100 people who had fallen ill --six of whom were children. The state of Florida would need to undertake a large effort to stop the outbreak.

The report had a clear recommendation: ?The high number of deaths in this outbreak emphasizes the need for vigilant active case finding, improved education about TB, and ongoing screening at all sites with outbreak cases.?

But Florida?s Republican legislature had just passed a budget that made deep cuts the state's health department, and an order went out that the state?s only tuberculosis hospital would be closed six months ahead of schedule.

The result: state officials ignored the 25-page report on the outbreak for nearly three months. As the report sat in Florida?s bureaucratic quagmire, the disease spread. And despite the outbreak, the state never revisited its plan to shutter Florida's only specialized TB hospital six months early, and the public was not made aware of the outbreak until last month, even though the same strain began to appear in other parts of the state--including Miami.

This lack of oversight could ultimately cost insurance companies and taxpayers millions of dollars. Treating TB is costly in money and time. As the Palm Beach Post explains:

"A person with an uncomplicated, active case of TB must take a cocktail of three to four antibiotics ? dozens of pills a day ? for six months or more. (...) But failure to stay on the drugs for the entire treatment period can and often does cause drug resistance.

"At that point, a disease that can cost $500 to overcome grows exponentially more costly. The average cost to treat a drug-resistant strain is more than $275,000, requiring up to two years on medications. For this reason, the state pays for public health nurses to go to the home of a person with TB every day to observe them taking their medications.

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Republican Representative Matt Hudson was the leading advocate of shutting down the state?s tuberculosis hospital, and he was ignorant about the CDC?s report until last Friday.

When he was informed about the situation he replied, ?there is every bit of understanding that we cannot not take care of people who have a difficult case of TB."

There is pennywise and pound foolish, and then there is just incompetence. Taglines and talking points about government waste may make for easy fodder on cable news, but real people in Florida will now be paying the consequences for their legislature?s short-sighted decisions.

Source: http://dlcc.org/node/07092012/florida_budget_cuts_tuberculosis

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