Republicans can’t destroy the safety net. So they’re making it an instrument of misery.
By Paul Waldman, Washington Post
March 27, 2019
Americans, it turns out, think very highly of Medicaid and were extremely resistant to the Republicans’ idea of kicking millions of people off the program.
They haven’t stopped trying, but in the absence of a repeal of the ACA, they’re pursuing an alternate tack to undermining Medicaid, one that has the added benefit of making the lives of poor people more stressful even if they manage to stay on the program. And it’s part of a broad Republican effort at both the national and state levels, one that amounts to a veritable war on poor Americans.
To see what that war produces, I refer you to an absolutely brutal account by Amy Goldstein of a program Arkansas has instituted with the blessing of the Trump administration to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients.
Work requirements sound good to many people on first glance — after all, shouldn’t people work if they’re able? — but in practice, they amount to the creation of a bureaucratic maze that recipients have to navigate, with the slightest misstep threatening to cost you your health coverage.
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Last year, the administration sent a letter to every state Medicaid director, urging them to enact work requirements so they could do the same thing to their own poor citizens that Arkansas has done to theirs. Kentucky’s work requirements have been held up by a lawsuit, Indiana’s are getting started, and programs in Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Michigan and Arizona are on their way. Other Republican-run states can’t wait to join.The likely result will be hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable Americans losing health coverage. And the president signed an executive order instructing agencies to create as many work requirements as possible to impose on low-income Americans who use food stamps, housing subsidies and other kinds of assistance.
We have to say a word about the philosophy that drives these kind of steps. On one level, if we’re talking about health care, it gets to whether you think it should be something everyone gets without questions asked — like an education through high school — or whether it’s something that should be a function of how much money you have, not just what kind you get but whether you’re allowed even a basic version.
Conservatives plainly see it as the latter. But more to the point, if it’s politically impossible to just take all government health care away from people, they’ll do what they can to make sure it comes with a dose of suffering and shame. You’ll have to navigate a bureaucratic maze to prove you’re worthy of the benefit, with the possibility of losing it always there — which adds stress and anxiety to people whose lives are already saturated with both.
And some would even like to impose drug testing on recipients, not because there’s some kind of drug problem among people on Medicaid but just to say that if we’re going to give you the privilege of health coverage, you’ll have to endure some humiliation along with it, just so it’s clear what society thinks of you.
You may say that’s a harsh caricature of conservative beliefs. But I’d encourage you to see it through a broader lens. One way to do that would be to tune into Fox Business any day, where you’ll hear panegyrics to the noble “job creators,” those who amassed their billions through nothing but hard work and pure hearts. If you truly believe that wealth is a sign of virtue — and conservatives certainly seem to — then the flip side is that those who don’t have any must be morally unworthy, their station in life the product of only their own sins and sloth.
So of course when government deals with those people, it should shower them with the contempt they deserve. That’s what drives these policies: If they can’t destroy the safety net, Republicans will add as much misery to it as they can muster.
So, Calvinist Pre-Destination and the Protestant Work Ethic.
If Yahweh is omniscient then he’s known since the beginning of time who are the Elect 144.000 who will be spared the Fiery Lake of Eternal Damnation (seems like a large number if you live in the Bronze Age but not much in comparison with the roughly 8 Billion people alive today).
Mortals are not blessed with omniscience, how then are they supposed to know if they’re living a virtuous life and will be spared at Judgement?
Simple. Yahweh is known to reward the Righteous, therefore if you are materially prosperous it is a sign of Yahweh’s favor.
But ek, what about all the Jesus stuff? Camel through the Eye of a Needle, That which you did for the Least of these, those kinds of things.
Socialist propaganda by Atheists looking to destroy your faith in the name of Satan.
I’m telling you, I did 10 years in a Fundamentalist Evangelical (Methodist) Sunday School and I remember my lessons better than some. My teachers hated me, couldn’t wait to see me leave.
Most people I know who are on Medicaid work very, very hard just getting through the day without dying.