For several years starting in 2015, Bruce Perfect’s son Greg was in and out of hospitals and “wasting away.” The regular medical system could not figure out what was causing his severe digestive problems, and eventually “put him in hospice care and sent him home to die.”
Then Bruce took Greg to the state-funded Lee Specialty Clinic in Louisville. The staff there quickly diagnosed him with a rare genetic disorder and started treatment. “Today, he is not only alive,” said Bruce, “but he is in great health, and he has the quality of life that we always hoped for him.”
Bruce was one of the scores of family members, patients and staff of the Lee Clinic who flocked to Frankfort for a recent legislative hearing. They packed four committee rooms and spoke out against state budget cuts that were set to shut the clinic down.
Lee’s care is unique; it is the only facility in the state that provides specialized medical, dental and behavioral care and therapy to over 1,000 patients with severe intellectual and developmental disabilities. Speaker after speaker shared the miracles worked by the staff at Lee Specialty Clinic–miracles that would be completely undone without it.
Their testimony provided a window into a world that is largely hidden: public employees, plugging away every day in often thankless jobs, doing work that would otherwise not be done. And sometimes saving lives and giving them meaning.
Media coverage of government typically focuses on partisan political clashes, horse-race coverage of elections and cases of financial mismanagement or abuse of public trust. People understandably turn off and tune out from public decisions and a broken political game.
But at the same time, people use and benefit from publicly-funded services every day. And while bureaucracy can be unnecessarily frustrating, most everybody understands and appreciates the unique roles government plays: like keeping the public safe and healthy through services like fire protection and food inspections, or getting us all where we need to go by building roads and bridges.
And in some cases, like the staff at the Lee Specialty Clinic, public employees are heroes who transform lives. That’s also the case with teachers that inspire, housing staff who help people find a home and emergency management employees who save people during natural disasters and help communities rebuild after them.
Services like these depend on the tax dollars that pay for them. Lee Specialty Clinic, for example, was entirely the creation of the Kentucky General Assembly. It was championed by former Representative Jimmie Lee and is funded through the state budget. Without tax dollars, which come primarily from income and sales taxes, it would not exist.
A problem arises when those taxes are reduced and nothing is envisioned to replace them. In recent years, the state legislature has cut the individual income tax from a top rate of 6% to just 3.5% today. If we had kept our income tax where it was, the legislature would have $2.1 billion more per year to spend on services for people like Greg than we do now. Instead, that loss led directly to the cuts of 3% in 2027 and another 4% in 2028 to most agencies in the new state budget, including the Cabinet for Health and Family Services that funds the Lee Specialty Clinic.
Another parent at the recent legislative hearing called the Lee staff “unicorns” who “work day and night for this population.” Behind the numbers in budgets are real and sometimes extraordinary people, playing roles no one else can—and no one else will if we do not fund them.
