news story / By Heidi Walters

Disabling Cuts

Some folks fear they’ll lose their ability to live at home under the guv’s budget

(June 4, 2009)  Last Friday afternoon, in John Anderson’s modest, garden-lavish Eureka house, the cockatiels in the huge, covered, indoor-outdoor cage attached to his bedroom were up to their usual stunts. An outburst of chirps here, a cheery shriek there.

Anderson was in the kitchen, where a gazillion thriving potted plants seemed to be taking over the windowed area round the sink, creating a spillage of green light. In the living room, a tidy, hardwood-floored space, there were more plants amid a spare assortment of artsy wall hangings, sculptures and other accoutrement of a life intensely lived.

GALLERY >

Anderson, with the help of a friend, was working his way into a sweater and hat so he could take Mowgli — a sweet, aging Doberman-Rottweiler mix with a gimpy front leg — for a walk. Finally, with his right hand, he pushed the button that propels his chair forward and rolled out the door, passing a refrigerator ironically adorned with a bumper sticker that says “Hard is square dancing in an elevator.”

Hard. These days, Anderson would tell you — no joke — that hard is the round of budget cuts Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed for crowbarring the state out of its Hell-deep deficit of $24.3 billion and growing.

“The budget cuts?” said Anderson. “No. No. I was going to write a letter to Schwarz — actually, if you don’t mind, Schwarzdick — about this. The only reason he got voted in was because he was a movie star. I’ve actually had friends tell me they voted for him because he’s the Terminator. Well …”

Anderson, who is 55, lost his left hand in a farming accident when he was 19. Then, in his 30s, he was riding his motorcycle in a driving rain one night on Highway 36, heading to his property in Dinsmore, when he rounded a tight curve and was blinded by oncoming headlights; his bike hit something and he crashed. The wreck broke his neck and left him paralyzed from the bellybutton down — although he suffers constantly from “pins and needles” caused by nerve damage in his feet, and lately the sensation has begun creeping up one leg. He wears a neck brace. He has seizures. He can’t work — and up until he broke his neck, he says, he always worked, including for many years as a chef in the Bay Area.

With his mom’s help as well as publicly funded care providers, Anderson’s been able to live in his own home. But some of the proposed state cuts might lead to a crumbling of the network of caregivers and services that help him stave off being institutionalized in a nursing home.

The cuts that would affect people like Anderson are tri-fold. Some would knock the wind out of Medi-Cal, the federal- and state-funded program that provides health insurance for low-income people, seniors, pregnant women and people with disabilities or certain diseases. Some would diminish SSI/SSP — Supplemental Security Income/State Supplementary Payment, a federal- and state-funded program that gives cash assistance to people 65 and older, or who are blind or disabled. Some would chop back In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS), a federal-, state- and county-funded program that pays care providers who perform specified tasks for people who are low-income and over 65, or blind or disabled, who, without such help, might not be able to live in their own homes (a right granted by the Supreme Court 10 years ago).

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