Working hard to make people poorer and sicker
As you may have seen, Trump and Co want to force people to work to qualify for Medicaid.
Under the planned new Health and Human Services regulations announced last week, waivers will be granted to states willing to restructure their programs to force individuals who would otherwise be eligible for Medicaid to work—generally for about 20 hours a week—to qualify for coverage.
What if they’re not well enough to work? What if they can’t find work? What if they have small children at home and no one else to take care of them?
They should have thought of that before they became poor.
The plan purports to help the poor economically and health-wise, but its almost certain to make people poorer and sicker instead. Nationwide, the changes are expected to drastically reduce enrollment, arbitrarily denying millions of impoverished people access to life-saving medical services.
Anti-poverty and health-care advocates say the waivers, which enable state Medicaid programs to mandate employment for all so-called “able-bodied” adults, are not only cruel but irrational: The vast majority of working-age Medicaid recipients (excluding the elderly and people with disabilities) currently are already employed anyway. Those who aren’t are often facing severe employment barriers precisely because of poor health. According to the think tank CLASP, “over one-third of working-age Medicaid recipients not working are unemployed because of illness or disability.”
They should just build a luxury high rise and get rich; problem solved.
Those who would be forced to find work as part of the administration’s work requirements will likely be tracked into low-wage jobs that simultaneously lack employer-sponsored benefits and leave them ineligible for Medicaid, according to a Community Catalyst analysis: Essentially, they would make too much to qualify for Medicaid, but still not get any benefits from their boss. These workers would also fall into an ever-widening coverage gap: too “rich” for Medicaid, too poor for subsidized insurance the federal health-care exchanges.
It’s what we do here – heap ever more rewards on the already rich, and ever more punishments on the struggling poor.
It’s the same thing that happened with welfare reform in 1997. I was at that time unemployed, being in the final recovery phases of a life-threatening illness, and had just lost my disability because I was no longer sick enough for disability (but still not able to hold a full time job). As a single mother with a teen, I did what most would – I applied for welfare. I was already receiving food stamps, because my disability check had barely covered the bills, and I was receiving on the high end of the disability spectrum.
They told me I could qualify for $75 a month – one one condition. (Well, there were several sub-conditions). I had to look for work, no fewer than 10 interviews a week. I had to take any job that was offered, no matter what the hours, no matter what the pay. And I could not tell a prospective employer that I had a preferred schedule, or any hours that I could not work. At the time, my son was old enough that I could leave him alone for a period of time, but overnight would be more than unreasonable, given the area we lived in, and his lack of maturity (he was 14). In addition, I was working on my master’s degree, in hopes of getting to a place where I could bring myself out of poverty, and accepting the terms would have meant I would be at the mercy of an employer and could not attend classes any more. I pointed that out to them, and they shrugged. That’s the way the law works, and if you want your check, you’ll be willing to quit school for it. This is the exact opposite of what welfare should be doing.
In addition, should I have gone that route, the minimum wage job at 20 hours a week would have disqualified me for welfare, without giving me even as much as my meager disability check had done. No benefits, and I was still needing medication and other treatments, and my son also required medication.
I opted against taking their ridiculous offer, said I would not trash any hope of a future for $75 a month, and removed myself from the premises. I was one of the fortunate ones – I managed to find a job just in time to prevent losing my home. It wasn’t a great job, but it paid all right, it worked around my school hours, and got me through. Of course, I had to listen to all sorts of religious nonsense all the time, because the bosses were all god botherers, in spite of the fact that they lacked any integrity or honesty whatsoever, and were more than willing to cheat both their clients and their employees (I managed to find another job and get out before they went belly up).
At that same time, the government limited welfare to five years in your lifetime. In spite of that, I still hear people, 20 years later, claiming that their neighbor has been on welfare forever, and will be on it forever. You can point out all you want to that the government does not allow lifelong welfare, but they know better because they see their neighbor doing…what? What is it about neighbors that makes them all on welfare in the eyes of their more “virtuous” neighbors? Of course, most people don’t know the difference between welfare, food stamps, and medicaid, and they have no idea that disability recipients are getting money because they are, like, disabled and unable to work, not because they are too lazy to work.
Could someone please arrange from Trump and his fellow Republicans to be out of work? And have to live on what they want to leave for everyone else? Please?
Especially since the first requirement for getting a job is… having a job. As Barbara Ehrenreich writes in Bait and Switch there are job advertisements that explicitly state that no unemployed people will even be considered. I don’t have the book in front of me right now, so I may not get the wording exactly right, but she quotes someone advising employers not to participate in job fairs because “after all, what kind of people go to job fairs? People without jobs. All you get are worthless resumes and lots of germs”.
The implicit or explicit assumption, grounded in the just world fallacy and the ideology of positive thinking (it’s funny how it all hangs together, isn’t it), is that those who really want to work can always get a job if they have the right attitude/aren’t loser types, so the fact that you haven’t yet chosen to conjure a job into existence through an act of will, becomes one more reason not to employ you now or in the future. In fact it’s worse than that, because now the next potential employer is going to ask what’s wrong with you since you failed to get this job, and the next employer after that…
Failing to apply for jobs beneath your qualifications? Well, unless you’re willing to accept any job, you deserve to get nothing. Applying for jobs beneath your qualifications? Gee! What is wrong with this one since (s)he has to apply for jobs beneath his/her qualifications? Better not risk it. Etc… etc… You can’t win.
How was that with “We will always uphold the right to life”?
It’s all about control, isn’t it? Being able to control women, being able to control the poor.
Iknklast, your story reminded me somewhat tangentially of a proposed welfare reform here in Britain. The idea was that in order to receive unemployment benefit the recipient would have to work for it. Not apply for jobs; not do un-paid training courses; actually go to work for a company in return for the benefit. I remember that Tesco and Poundland signed up to take advantage of what was essentially free labour for them.
Strange how these companies could find vacancies for those on the scheme, but not for people seeking paid employment.
AoS, I don’t know about now, but in the 1980s, when I was working for a personnel department, our agency (it was government, but private companies could do the same thing) would get a benefit – some sort of subsidy, I think – for hiring people currently on welfare. As a result, we tended to boot those on welfare to the head of the line in consideration for positions. That might actually be a good way to go – give employers a boost for hiring these folks, rather than the government tying their benefits to the job and paying the benefit rather than the worker getting paid for his/her honest labor.
Yes, there have been similar schemes here which did work, but they were predicated on the employee being paid properly. The proposed scheme that I mentioned would have seen the company get workers free-of-charge and the workers receive no more than the standard unemployment benefits, which is about as sleazy as it gets.