Budget numbers can cause head-scratching in wake of Blunt's State of the State address

~ The governor mentioned no less than 57 numbers last week in his State of the State and budget address.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Numbers. They add legitimacy to assertions. They are the foundation of facts. They are essential to businesses, households and governments alike.

And they can also be confusing -- downright head-scratching, sometimes.

Gov. Matt Blunt mentioned no less than 57 numbers last week in his State of the State and budget address. There were numbers as dollars, cents and percents, years and dates, rankings and measurements. There were general numbers and specific numbers.

At times, some of the numbers lent themselves to considerable head-scratching.

Consider the series of numbers about the Medicaid health-care program for the poor, which grew in dollars this year even though Blunt and the Republican-led legislature cut back the number of people enrolled in the program.

Blunt, in his State of the State speech, proposed additional Medicaid spending for the next budget year but no additional cuts to benefits.

He mentioned two relatively large numbers. Blunt said his proposed budget for the 2007 fiscal year contains an additional $275 million in state funds for Medicaid. But had cuts not been made last year, he said, the Medicaid program would have cost an additional $935 million in state funds.

Inquiring minds may have been a little confused, however, when they looked at Blunt's budget book distributed the same evening as his speech.

According to numbers in the budget book, Blunt is proposing to spend $1.4 billion in state general revenue on Medicaid next year, an increase of $197 million over this year -- not $275 million as cited in his speech.

Both valid numbers

Blunt's budget director, Larry Schepker, said both numbers are valid.

The net increase is actually $197 million, he said.

But when preparing the Medicaid calculations, Schepker's staff used for a baseline the 2006 fiscal year budget as originally signed into law, which doesn't account for about $30 million in supplemental spending expected to be necessary yet this year. From that, they then subtracted about $44 million that had paid for Medicaid enrollees and services no longer covered -- and thus no longer needed in next year's budget.

It's from that lower starting point that budget analysts derived the $275 million increase cited by Blunt.

"Us budget people look at a core [budget] and we take out costs we don't need before we add stuff back in again," Schepker explains.

But the bottom line to most people, he acknowledges, is a $197 million increase.

If that's not confusing enough, consider the math involved in Blunt's claim that Medicaid would have cost an additional $935 million next year were it not for Republican cost-cutting.

Blunt's administration commissioner, Michael Keathley, said the figure is rooted in the budget circumstances that existed shortly after Blunt was elected in November 2004.

At the time, Missouri was in the middle of the 2005 fiscal year, which had a Medicaid budget of more than $1.2 billion in state general revenue. And the Department of Social Services had requested an additional $460 million for the 2006 fiscal year -- a 37 percent increase.

The requested increase never occurred because Blunt and the legislature eliminated 90,000 people from Medicaid, reduced benefits for 339,000 others and took additional cost-cutting measures.

But if the requested increase had been granted for the 2006 fiscal year, and the same percentage growth held true for the next year, then the 2007 Medicaid budget would have needed an additional $629 million in state funds, Keathley said.

Add the hypothetical 2006 and 2007 increases together and you get a two-year increase of $1.09 billion. Subtract the actual increase from that figure and you get the potential $935 million increase that Blunt claimed could have occurred were it not for his cuts.

Following Holden's lead

Blunt's Republican administration is not the only one to cite head-scratching numbers.

Democratic Gov. Bob Holden frequently claimed to have made hundreds of millions of dollars of cuts while proposing budgets with net increases. That's because agencies' core budgets were reduced before new spending items were added.

But there is one budget number -- unmentioned by Blunt in his speech -- that appears to be a first.

Blunt's administration is charging the general public $10 for a paper copy of his budget book. It's available free electronically on a compact disc and over the Internet.

Schepker says the charge is intended to recoup part of the state's $7,200 printing cost while also encouraging the paperless options.

So far, the budget's not exactly a best-seller. Through Friday, 50 copies had been sold.

Or, presenting that number in a different way: The budget itself generated $500.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Capitol Correspondent David A. Lieb covers Missouri government and politics for The Associated Press.