Hello Readers: This is a snippet from my statement of beliefs that I created during my 2012 campaign for State Representative in Portsmouth.
I have spent my entire career working in human services. My colleagues are dedicated people working to improve the lives of others through service. Despite those herculean efforts over the past several decades, we have seen increases in many social problems even as human services funding has increased. The Medicaid programs in particular are fraught with problems.
Unfortunately, our helping system in New Hampshire and around the country has become bureaucratized, duplicative, costly, inefficient, and overly professionalized. The public health system is encumbered by onerous documentation and procedural complexity that is burning out many of its workers and impacting care. Some of the services designed to help people are actually making things worse. We have insufficient outcome studies to help us understand which programs are helping and which ones may actually be hurting.
Find out what's happening in Nashuafor free with the latest updates from Patch.
Therefore we need a thorough evaluation of all New Hampshire human services before we continue to fund things that are not working or are creating dependency on providers or the state itself. We should support services that have been proven to work and withhold support from services that have not been proven to be effective.
I will vote against any increase in funding for human services until such an outcomes evaluation is completed. I support the recent Medicaid reforms that give New Hampshire more power to be creative in the way they spend Medicaid as a function of the mandates from the federal government, but I would ideally like to see all federal mandates removed. I would draw from my expertise as a human services provider and systems reformer to sponsor bills that would propose opting out of the Medicaid program and all other federally mandated (and often unfunded) poverty programs in their entirety and developing a more efficient, and more effective, locally controlled New Hampshire system.
