Tagged: blind

The Missouri Council of the Blind hopes to foster improvements for the visually impaired in Columbia by establishing a new chapter. The council hopes to identify key people in the community and  is searching for leaders to run the Columbia council. With MU being a large part of the state Columbia community, executive director of the Council of the Blind, Chris Gray says the chapter would benefit the area.

Missouri budget negotiators have agreed to keep a program that provides health coverage for the blind, but they've also attempted to attach some strings.

A State Senate panel spent several hours Wednesday putting together their version of Missouri’s state budget for next year.  But the fate of a program for blind residents is still up in the air.

The Missouri House has given first-round approval to the state budget for next year.  As St. Louis Public Radio’s Marshall Griffin tells us, Republican leaders pushed through their plan to restore higher education cuts proposed by Governor Jay Nixon by refusing to fund a program for blind residents.

Governor Jay Nixon told reporters yesterday that lawmakers in Jefferson City are trying to balance the state budget on the backs of some of the state's neediest: poor blind people. But members of the House budget committee said cuts to health care for blind Missourians are necessary to pay for higher education, which the governor wants to trim. 

Governor Jay Nixon is calling on the Missouri House to restore health care funding for low income blind people, after a committee voted last week to cut the program from next year’s budget.