County chipping away at WIC
After leading the charge this year to weaken the county’s crucial role in public health, Sedgwick County Commission Chairman Richard Ranzau last week launched a related offensive against illegal immigration and, unbelievably, took a new shot at breast-feeding.
“I’m not sure we need to be in the breast-feeding business,” Ranzau said, unsuccessfully advocating the county eliminate three part-time peer counselors because he doesn’t consider breast-feeding a core function of government.
Bear in mind that such counseling helps more low-income women in the Women, Infants and Children program breast-feed their babies, which in turn improves rates of child survival and lifelong health. County staff has set 2016 goals of increasing the percentages of WIC enrollees who initiate breast-feeding from 77 to 79 percent and who breast-feed for at least three months from 33 to 35 percent.
“In the time that we added the breast-feeding peer counselors at the end of 2011, we increased breast-feeding initiation by 8.8 percent and duration by 11 percent, so they’ve been shown to be very effective in helping babies get the best nutrition possible,” health department director Adrienne Byrne-Lutz told the commissioners.
The agenda item was for renewal of a state grant consisting entirely of federal WIC funds, in the amount of $2.2 million.
Fortunately, the practical effect of Ranzau’s extensive plan to chip away at the WIC program in the county will be limited, at least for now. He got Commissioner Jim Howell’s needed third vote to reduce the size of the WIC grant by $320,000 for next year, for a total $1.9 million. But some other actions were deferred. Ranzau contended the cut was justified because caseloads and overhead costs have declined for WIC, which he called a “welfare program under the guise of a public health program.”
Howell and Commissioner Karl Peterjohn also sounded supportive of other Ranzau ideas, though, including his desire to deny WIC’s nutrition benefits to undocumented residents – which no state has done and would require federal approval.
More immediately, they want the county to ask the citizenship status of those who receive health department services. Of course, a step Ranzau claimed would be mere data gathering would deter at least some eligible applicants.
Making cuts and eliminating positions related to WIC, and lobbying the state to change eligibility, merited much more discussion than Ranzau wanted to give his proposals last week. And the debate and votes came across as more shortsighted second-guessing of staff, and on a program that spends federal rather than local dollars but directly affects the health of vulnerable women and babies.
After the recent county cutbacks in programs aimed at curbing infant mortality and providing breast and cervical cancer screenings, one also wonders whether Ranzau and the other two commissioners in the majority are oblivious to how it looks for an all-white, all-male governing body to target programs that primarily affect women, especially poor and minority ones.
For the editorial board, Rhonda Holman
This story was originally published October 12, 2015 at 7:07 PM with the headline "County chipping away at WIC."