OPINION: Listen to Jesus, not GOP, on Medicaid work requirements
It's a message seemingly lost on our Republican state lawmakers, many of whom will surely go be at church this Easter morning, but plan, when they return from spring break, to get cracking on a bill that would require recipients of Medicaid to prove that they work at least 30 hours a week in order to retain the benefits that may keep them employable, healthy or alive.
Cheap shot? Yeah.
But it's also an ugly truth.
S.B. 897's sponsors cloak their work in the language of personal responsibility: Able-bodied adults should work. Government should provide a hand up, not a hand out.
The bill's sponsor, Sen.
This is a nasty little piece of legislation, indulging in the most destructive stereotypes about poverty, the notion that folks who receive benefits are lazy jerks who'd rather exploit the system than find a job.
Nearly 50% of enrollees in the Healthy Michigan expansion do work, a 2017 study conducted by
"Medicaid recipients who are working would have to proceed through another bureaucratic hoop to maintain coverage, while they have health care needs they're currently seeing us for," said
Because people who live in poverty tend to move more frequently, it can be difficult for mail to catch up with them, Propson said: "They can lose coverage because they don't know that they need to document this requirement."
This is not very much money.
About 687,000 people have received insurance through this Healthy Michigan program; about 2 million Michiganders total receive Medicaid health benefits.
If this legislation passes, the number of people who get those benefits will decline. Some recipients may find work -- this legislation directs the state
Those folks? They'd just be out of luck.
"By and large, there's no help for people who don't have insurance in this country," Propson said. "The big question we need to be asking is, what person with diabetes should not get insulin? What person with an abscessed tooth should not get an extraction? Since most people would answer that it is unthinkable that they themselves should ever be denied treatment of an infection, why would we withhold it from people who we're requiring to do additional work to show they have a job?"
The legislation includes some exemptions: anyone who is the sole caretaker of a child under 6 months (non-single parents need not apply?), a disabled dependent or a full-time student; people receiving long-term disability payments from a private insurer, an employer or the government; getting treatment for substance abuse; seven to nine months pregnant or pregnant at any stage with a medical complication.
Unaddressed are folks who've diligently searched for work but can't find it, can't reach job centers because our transit system stinks, who are physically unable to work but haven't yet been judged disabled by the
"Every one of these reasons to deny you healthcare kills people," Propson said. "It might only kill 10 people or 50 people or 100 people, but when there are delays in accessing health care, there are victims."
Propson is right. And when I think of those lawmakers -- some of whom like to think of America as a Christian nation, and can't get enough of religion when it comes to allowing adoption agencies to bar gay couples from adopting or denying women access to reproductive care, but do not seem motivated to help those in need -- I can't help but think of comedian
"If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor," Colbert said, "either we've got to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition -- and then admit that we just don't want to do it."
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