SACRAMENTO AND LOS ANGELES — AIDS drugs. Health insurance for the luckless. A hand for junkies trying to kick drugs. Help for a single mom trying to get a job.
The poor, the sick and the people who help them survive paraded into the state Capitol to plead with lawmakers Wednesday to spare the programs Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said must be slashed to tame California's $24.3-billion budget deficit.
Schwarzenegger argues that the state's declining economy and plummeting tax revenues have boxed California into a corner, forcing deep and historic cuts in the health and welfare programs that form the state's social safety net. Without those tough measures, he says, California will cartwheel toward insolvency.
But a 10-person legislative budget panel, which is reviewing the governor's proposals, listened during a long day in a crowded hearing room to scores of people who said their survival depends on programs set to be hit by the budget ax.
They heard from mothers of children with autism, representatives of people on dialysis, poor parents whose children see dentists on the government's dime, former drug abusers set straight by a state rehab program.
And they heard from a woman named Lynnea Garbutt who has lived with AIDS all of her 24 years.
She has survived with the help of a state program that provides the expensive antiviral drugs she takes. Now, with that program facing elimination, she pleaded with lawmakers to save it -- and her life.
"If these cuts take place, you're not just cutting money from the program -- you're cutting my life," she told the panel, her voice shaking and tears falling. "I choose to live. Please don't make me die. My choice is life."
The governor, who was appearing at an event in Los Angeles, lamented that many of the most severe cuts might have been avoided if voters had approved a slate of ballot measures in the May 19 special election. That would have pumped nearly $6 billion into state coffers.
"I think that the people have spoken now. . . . They don't want to raise taxes," Schwarzenegger said. "That's why they voted no. . . . So we are jammed into a corner and we have to now act fiscally responsible."
Schwarzenegger said the state's revenues "are in a free-fall right now" and expressed sadness over the budget-slashing that he has resolved to carry out.
