Today’s Managing Health Care Costs Number is 15%
The AHCA is headed toward a vote in the House of Representatives tomorrow night – although many oddsmakers say that Paul Ryan does not have the votes to pass the bill, and it’s more likely to be held over for further overhaul before a vote. The bill would likely make worse just about every problem its authors say intends to fix – so any delay is good.
One recent concession to conservatives, who would like the government out of health care finance altogether, is allowing states to require work of nondisabled adults who receive Medicaid.
This idea “feels” fair. Here’s a paragraph from the beginning of Brooke Gladstone’s excellent “Busted, America’s Poverty Myths” from On the Media this past fall:
A recent poll conducted by the LA Times and the conservative American Enterprise Institute finds that roughly 87% of Americans, including 81% of those below the poverty line, believe that requiring poor people to seek work or training in return for benefits is better than providing aid without asking for anything in return. And that’s pretty much what we found as we hopped from Cleveland to Appalachia to Columbus on our poverty tour.
But it’s a terrible idea. Here’s an explanation from a later episode of Busted of why a job requirement for poverty programs are not useful:
Well, aside from there not being enough jobs that pay above the poverty line, the vast majority just can't work because the Census Bureau says that a quarter of the poor are kids, roughly 14% are elderly, 13% disabled, 9% are engaged in caring for someone full-time, 8% are students and 16% percent are already fully employed. That’s 85%. The remainder includes many workers who are suffering through a dry spell in a bad market. We could move them into work if we covered their basic expenses and training and helped them find jobs, but we don't.
Work requirements are a way of stigmatizing the poor, and are likely to disrupt access to care to many disabled Americans. Administrative costs go up, and access is diminished for the most needy. Hopefully, even this egregious plan won’t mollify the conservative Freedom Caucus, leaving the AHCA short of the required 216 votes to pass.
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