Governors Back Aid for Immigrants

WASHINGTON —  The nation’s governors pledged Tuesday that they would work to help legal immigrants keep welfare benefits but they decided against asking Congress to restore food stamps and disability aid for elderly and disabled immigrants.

The policy statement, adopted at the close of the four-day National Governors’ Assn. meeting here, came a day after three Southern California counties disclosed bureaucratic maneuvers that will allow poor legal immigrants to continue receiving food stamps for several months after new federal welfare rules take effect in April.

Governors attending the bipartisan conference also voted to oppose President Clinton’s plan for a per-capita spending cap on Medicaid payments to the states. Gov. Pete Wilson of California has been especially vehement in condemning that proposal.

Democratic Gov. Robert Miller of Nevada, the conference chairman, said that the chief executives are urging Clinton to give the states flexibility on Medicaid, which provides health care to the poor, blind and disabled elderly.

“We think Medicaid reform is going to be a moving target for the next few months,” Miller said.

The details of Clinton’s Medicaid plan will be presented Thursday as part of the president’s proposed federal budget.

In their resolution on immigrants, the governors called on Congress and the White House “to ensure that the immigration system and its requirements are fair to both citizens and noncitizens and meet the needs of aged and disabled legal immigrants who cannot naturalize and whose benefits may be affected.”

The nation’s governors “further believe that an equitable solution to this issue could be achieved without reopening” last year’s welfare reform law, the resolution said.

Republican governors, under pressure from GOP leaders in Congress, strongly objected to amending the 1996 welfare law only six months after Clinton had signed it. As a result, the final resolution was watered down and a phrase saying that legal immigrants “should not be barred from federal supplemental security income benefits and food stamps” was deleted.

But on Monday officials in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties said that they could delay the loss of food stamps to immigrants by conducting a massive reenrollment campaign that would maintain their benefits through August.

Discussing Medicaid policy, Miller told reporters that a governors’ task force will assess whatever Clinton proposes.

“Essentially, we feel that, if you are going to give the basic responsibility to a state, you must also give states flexibility” to decide how to administer services most economically, Miller said.

Earlier this week Wilson made the same point, complaining that Clinton’s plan would be “extremely unfair” to California because it “would punish us for having done a good job of managing” the program.

Largely by pressing patients into managed-care plans, California has driven down its cost per patient to one of the lowest in the nation. It spends almost $9.8 billion on nearly 5 million patients.

But under the per-capita cap in Clinton’s budget, such efficiencies would form the basis for future payments. Thus states like New York, with much higher per-patient costs, would get more money for each new Medicaid case.

The governors resolved that Medicaid, now “the second-largest expenditure in state budgets,” must be maintained “without further cost shifts from the federal government to states.”