Medicaid Matters: Are Medicaid Work Requirements an attack against the sick and poor?
It seems that the Trump administration is on a warpath lately. Be it with
These wars have been all over the news lately but there is another war that is ongoing that has received much less attention and it is being waged against the poor. Two weeks ago, Trump quietly signed a long-anticipated executive order intended to force low-income recipients of food assistance, Medicaid and low-income housing subsidies to join the work force or face the loss of their benefits.
The order, in the works since last year, has an ambitious title - "Reducing Poverty in America" - and is directed at "any program that provides means-tested assistance or other assistance that provides benefits to people, households or families that have low incomes," according to the order's text.
Last week,
As discussed at
In theory, this seems like a good thing. Getting more able-bodied individuals to engage in the workforce will increase the tax base and stimulate the economy. However, there are some who believe this is not a good thing at all.
"After President
Jacobs goes on to say, "They disregarded the large group of advocates voicing strong opposition and what this would really mean to students, cancer patients and others struggling with illness, and our economy. These are people who have Medicaid for a variety of reasons, from having had tragic accidents that have left them home-bound to having temporarily low incomes due to unexpected life changes." These are real Michiganders who are scared of losing access to the healthcare they so badly need. They're struggling every day, yet some lawmakers want to make that struggle even more difficult," she said.
According to the
The organization also suggests looking to
"Evidence shows that Medicaid is keeping people healthy and able to work, not enabling residents to avoid it, and the League will keep fighting to ensure data and logic win out over political rhetoric as the battle now shifts to the House, Jacobs stated. "We believe that Medicaid is a health plan, not a jobs plan, and that these work requirements will only cause more problems for people who are already struggling."
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