With Governor Bruce Rauner having laid out his proposals for slashing spending by up to 20 percent, and with further cost-cutting measures likely to be unveiled in his “State of the State” speech on February 4, it is critical that library advocates act now to ensure that maintaining funding levels at an acceptable level is first and foremost in legislators’ minds. To that end, the annual Legislative Meet-Ups, sponsored by the Illinois Library Association, offer an excellent opportunity to strengthen existing connections with elected officials and to build new ones. The dates and locations for this year’s four meet-ups are below. If possible, try to attend one of the first three, since they fall before the Governor’s is due to submit his budget, on February 18.<\/p>\n
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Friday, February 13–South Suburban Breakfast in Tinley Park<\/p>\n
Friday, February 13–West Suburban Lunch in Oak Brook<\/p>\n
Monday, February 16–North Suburban Breakfast in Buffalo Grove<\/p>\n
Friday, March 6–Metro East Breakfast in Edwardsville<\/p>\n
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The deadline for registering to attend a meet-up is February 1. To sign up for one, click here<\/a>. To see which event covers your legislative district, click here<\/a>. If you need to check who your current legislators are, you can do so here<\/a>.<\/p>\n In addition to financial support for education and libraries, Medicaid funding is another area that could face severe cuts . During his campaign for governor, Rauner raised concerns about the potential for decreasing levels of reimbursement from the federal government, meaning that Illinois would have to pick up possibly 50 percent of the funding. (Currently under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government will cover 100 percent of Medicaid funding for newly-eligible enrollees, through 2016. The share of funding covered by the federal government will then fall to 90 percent in 2020.) In addition, due to concerns about fraudulent enrollment resulting from expanded eligibility (400,000 people, or more than double the expected number, have enrolled since then-Governor Pat Quinn signed Medicaid expansion into law this past July), Rauner has suggested further transferring the state’s Medicaid program into a managed-care system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With Governor Bruce Rauner having laid out his proposals for slashing spending by up to 20 percent, and with further cost-cutting measures likely to be unveiled in his “State of the State” speech on February 4, it is critical that library advocates act now to ensure that maintaining funding levels at an acceptable level is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,60,17,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences-and-meetings-non-hsli","category-illinois-library-association","category-legislation","category-library-associations-non-hsli"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hsli.org\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hsli.org\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hsli.org\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hsli.org\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hsli.org\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hsli.org\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hsli.org\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hsli.org\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hsli.org\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}