We do not know for sure yet... just judging one what he has said and done so far.
St. Paul, Minn. — When state officials talk about cutting the health and human services budget, they're talking about Tim Benjamin. Benjamin is a quadriplegic who said a personal care attendant, or PCA, watches him 24 hours a day.
"They shower me. They do my bowel program. They do my range of motion. They dress me. They put me to bed at night," Benjamin said.
Benjamin, of St. Paul, said his PCA also helps him get to work and assists with other daily functions. Before the legislative session ended last month, Gov. Pawlenty signed a Health and Human Services budget bill that will cut funding for personal care attendants. Estimates say as many as 1,600 disabled people will lose PCA services altogether. Another 7,000 people, like Tim Benjamin, could lose hours.
"Two hours doesn't sound like much for many people, but for me, I have respiratory problems," he said. "Without two hours of care, I can drown in my own secretions."
When asked this week about his plans for what's called unallotment, Pawlenty said he's considering a menu of options that includes cuts to higher education, local governments and health and human services programs. He said every program has to do more with less in tough budget times.
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/06/03/unallottement_targets/No tax increases though, that is off the table. As a moderate I like to think that a good answer is both a cut to some services and an increase in taxes to a level that we have had in the past. If you are only about raising taxes or only about cutting services, I am suspect.
and this is not how the power has been used in the past,
"This kind of use of unallotment is unprecedented," Massa said. "It's mostly used after the fact. To use this prospectively as a budget balancing technique, it seems unusual. We certainly want to assure our members that we're looking at all options and whether the governor has the ability to do this."
» Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) in Minneapolis will lay off 100 staffers.
» Park Nicollet Health Services lays off 240 and closes a clinic in Hopkins. The owner of Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park has already laid off more than twice that number over the last six months.
» Willmar’s Rice Memorial Hospital continues to shed staff. Layoffs have left the city-owned hospital with its smallest workforce in a decade.
» In rural areas of the state, doctors are scarce. Health care organizations must dangle bonuses to attract debt-laden med school grads to the hinterlands.
» Losing patients, North Memorial Health Care is cutting 100 jobs. A 6-percent decline in stays at the Robbinsdale hospital hides one area in which business is up by 22 percent: charity care.
» Two metro hospitals that care for the poor — Regions in St. Paul and HCMC in Minneapolis — will make deep cuts. HCMC Medical Director Michael Belzer says revisiting state cuts during the 2010 Legislative session will be too late, as hospitals will have set budgets and take actions necessary to meet them by then.
http://minnesotaindependent.com/35132/pawlentys-health-care-cuts-come-amid-hellish-week-for-hospitals
