Hannah Soyer
[email protected]

The Iowa Department of Human Services is being investigated to see if it defied legislative intent when it allocated $750,000 to the new Medicaid budget instead of to “Supported Employment,” a program that helps people with disabilities find and keep jobs. According to Human Services and those defending its actions, the intent of the funding was never made clear by legislators. Representatives who proposed the $750,000, however, are adamant that what was to be done with the money was clear.

Considering I am not a legislator and therefore have no experience in this issue, I cannot say whether in fact Human Services defied legislative intent in its treatment of the $750,000. As someone with a physical disability who receives services from the agency, I also couldn’t say if money is more needed for the state Medicaid program, which I benefit from, or Supported Employment, which I don’t benefit from but which many other Iowans with disabilities do.

The confusion in where this money was meant to be used, however, does seem to speak volumes about the structure of Human Services and how poorly run it is. As with all government agencies, it has layers upon layers of bureaucratic holes to jump through in order to receive services. It’s incredibly difficult to get in contact with an employee there and to hear back from them in a timely manner.

It is also likely that if you ask the same question of two different people, you will receive two different answers. This may be because at the time of the budget proposal for fiscal 2017, Medicaid served approximately 575,000 people, and that is just one small portion of what Human Services covers. This cost approximately $4.8 billion the previous fiscal year, a cost that has doubled since 2003. Because of this, Iowa privatized Medicaid this spring.

As someone on Medicaid, I have not noticed any significant changes since this privatization, although it may be too soon to tell. As much as I am against the privatization of governmental agencies, hopefully, the change in Medicaid will be a positive one, allowing Iowans who are on it access to more services at a lower cost to the individual and to the government. If this does prove to be fruitful, perhaps it’s time for Human Services to consider more overhauls to its system.

The well-grounded fear with privatization is that with governmental services in the hands of a private company, motives can suddenly become muddled, and those on top may choose to run things too much like a business, in which profit is the only thing that matters, not the quality of services provided. This cannot happen, especially to Human Services, which has so many programs that people’s lives depend on. However, a change of some sort needs to take place in order for the department to be run more efficiently.

We can only hope that the investigation of the allocation of $750,000 will lead to a more in-depth investigation of Human Services as a whole and a serious look at how changes can be made.