I'M an opponent of social-services cuts, so it's ironic for me to criticize the Legislature's failure to take more substantive action during its recent special session. After all, the vulnerable were largely spared amid a modest shell game of fund shifts and some cuts.

Yet delay does vulnerable citizens no favors. In fact, it only exacerbates their eventual plight.

Compassion in wanting to avoid cuts is understandable. But, when it comes to vulnerable kids and seniors, compassion can kill if it turns into irresolution that only compounds future suffering. And any irresolution will be exploited by opportunists using vital human needs as a hostage for agendas unrelated to the budget.

Because Medicaid is a federal-state partnership, state Medicaid cuts can require months to give beneficiaries notice and allow federal review. That's true even though a federal rubber stamp of almost any moral outrage involving medical care for the indigent is inevitable.

Given the state's revenue shortfall, each month that passes with a proposed cut unaddressed simply balloons that cut's eventual size or the revenue increase necessary to prevent it. A cut intended for Jan. 1 must be 17 percent bigger by April 1 to save as much.

Cash-strapped Washington state is already almost a diabolical laboratory for Medicaid experimentation — pushing cost-saving but addictive methadone on those in chronic pain, and even rationing incontinence supplies and effectively forcing food banks to provide life-sustaining oral nutrition to the elderly on Medicaid.

Rather than the federal government, courts have forestalled many big Medicaid cuts, including — after doctors sued — a cut rationing emergency-room care (in a Catch-22, ERs can't turn patients away).

But this cannot go on forever. Either cuts must be made or revenue found to avoid them. Even the courts may offer no refuge.

The Obama administration, at the behest of states, has asked the conservative U.S. Supreme Court to make Medicaid lawsuits impossible. Soon there may be no justice for the medically indigent, and their caregivers, beyond advance notice of the latest indignity.

As Doug Porter, the head of the state's Medicaid program, noted in outlining potential cuts, "These are grim times, and this is a grim list."

Political paralysis only makes things grimmer. In any scenario, cuts fall frightfully on social services, given the state's failed constitutional duty to fund K-12 education — and a once-proud higher-education system's continuing atrophy.

Thus, for example, how much bigger will an averted caseload increase for child social workers become? The caseload per social worker was proposed to rise from 17 to 20 on Jan. 1 to save $8.6 million from an overworked Children's Administration already much-sued for negligent oversight.

Further, bigger state Medicaid cuts mean bigger losses of federal matching funds — doubling harm in most cases.

Delay also creates the need for new cuts. Thus those spared by the governor's proposals may be in the danger zone when the 2012 legislative session opens with huge unfinished business before it.

Lawmakers must have a productive January. Leading up to the Jan. 9 opening, they should hear the clock ticking like Edgar Allen Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart." The dithering congressional "supercommittee" is a cautionary tale — its failure means 2 percent annual Medicare cuts, making Medicaid cuts more unbearable for care providers.

Under the governor's proposal, the 2011-13 budget would be more than $2.3 billion less than where the 2007-09 budget ended. Those are indisputably cut dollars, not just subtractions from failing to pay for inflation or caseload increases like an 11.5 percent larger long-term care population in an aging society.

This crisis didn't arise overnight. Legislators have had years to assess revenue ideas. Make the public case now. Running out the clock more runs the risk of further harming, even killing, those in greatest need.