A generation ago, the Republican Party’s preferred government-funded lazy symbol was the “Welfare Queen,” a quasi-mythical figure who collected checks and sat at home watching TV. Today’s Republican Party is fixed on a more unfamiliar goal: to capitalize on taxpayers’ unemployed adults by charging free … health insurance.
Today, the fiscal core of the “big and beautiful bill” is to take Medicaid away from unemployed adults through Congress. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the job requirement will save $300 billion in a decade and receive health insurance from 7.6 million people. This will not offset the impact of the deficit exploration of expanding and expanding the 2017 tax cuts, but it is one of the only big spending that the Congressional Republican caucus reached a consensus.
Proponents describe work requirements as fair and appropriate incentives. exist New York Times "In the past decade, millions of toned adults have been added, mainly due to the expansion of Medicaid," Trump administration official Robert F. Kennedy Jr. complained. "Many of these recipients are working-age individuals without children, who may be on welfare for many years. Some of them don't work at all, or they are inconsistent throughout the year."
This claim is hidden behind the weasel word (“many, “some”) and, according to recent academic research based on U.S. census data, only 8% of Medicaid recipients are healthy, unemployed adults.
Little RFK and his co-authors didn't clarify exactly how the job requirements get their imagined Medicaid Queens off the sofa, but the meaning is threaten Deleting free health care will allow these lazy people to find jobs. (“We believe that jobs are transformative for individuals who move from welfare to employment.” no On-the-job. If each Medicaid recipient properly ensures or seeks government-specific work, they will retain their Medicaid benefits and require no cuts to spend. (Yes, some people who find jobs will get health insurance from their employers, but many still need Medicaid because many low-paying jobs are not insurance.)
But what actually happens is very different. Job requirements will create complex reporting requirements that will cause eligible Medicaid recipients (who have a job or care for a child or are unable to work) to lose health care.
This is not a guess. We know how Medicaid job requirements work, as the policy has been tried at the state level. For example, Arkansas implemented job requirements in 2018. The researchers found that they were completely unable to encourage more employment among Medicaid people. Instead, job requirements force Medicaid recipients to navigate endless complex paperwork, many of which cannot understand or track, causing them to lose their Medicaid eligibility. Much of the savings comes from denying reports of qualified Americans who don’t want to work adults.
Georgia tried its own version of the job requirements in 2023 and experienced even greater extreme failures. Under its coverage program pathway, the state has expanded Medicaid eligibility, but forces recipients to verify their employment status or participate in other eligible activities, such as volunteering or vocational training. A year later, only 4,231 Georgians were admitted, accounting for about 2% of the eligible population. Incredibly, Georgia spent five times on the system to verify its eligibility as its healthcare qualification.
Sometimes the research produces contradictory results, but if the supporters of the job requirements have evidence that the policy can do it, they will tout it. RFK Jr. op-Ed seems to nod at the failure of well-documented job requirements, simply waving with a declaration of faith: "Some people will argue that job requirements create barriers to resources. We do not agree. We believe that welfare dependence rather than work is a barrier, a barrier." You can trust the data, or the heartfelt beliefs of four political appointees, two of which are famous quacks.
You might wonder why Republicans chose a policy that was so severely affected by its own way as a national model. The cynical answer, perhaps the correct answer, is that the policy is designed to fail. Complex reports require screening of qualified applicants. Congressional Republicans can pretend that they don’t deny people who need it because these people are theoretically able to access it. However, these politicians can be sure that a large number of qualified beneficiaries will not achieve this through administrative burdens, thus providing them with an easy way to reduce spending.
Indeed, the Republicans claim that the purpose of this exercise is actually Protect Medicaid beneficiaries. "When many Americans who really need Medicaid to provide lifesaving services, Washington cannot further undermine the program through subsidies," House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie, wrote in a recent recent. Wall Street Journal expert. The House Budget Committee asserted on its website: “Not only does Medicaid lack job requirements for sound adults, but in many cases, the federal government pays more to cover workers, single men than to vulnerable pregnant women or people with disabilities.”
If the problem of spending too little on “real” Americans in need is the problem, then Congressional Republicans can make their interests more generous. Instead, they intend to use the proceeds from work requirements to tax cuts, which almost seems like the plight of low-income pregnant women and people with disabilities is not really a concern for them.
Even if it is yes There is a broader question that might be designed to screen out job requirements that only sound adults who choose not to work: Why do you do this? On what ethical basis should we deny health insurance for people who don’t work?
Almost all economic systems, even most socialist systems, will have Some Items that people can only access through hard work, inheritance or luck. The Republicans are unique among the major Conservatives around the world because they believe that access to conventional medical care should be one of these commodities.
Although the Republican internal discrimination on this issue has attracted widespread media attention, no one in the party really proposed whether to cut Medicaid, only how to cut Medicaid. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley published Monday New York Times In his own column, he urged Republicans not to cut Medicaid. However, even he recently endorsed the job requirements and did so with such an operation that would not harm the pretend cooperation of qualified recipients.
Despite the good job requirements, Republican supporters of the policy also don’t have much confidence in how voters work in practice. As a compromise with the yielding MPs of Congress in areas with large numbers of Medicaid recipients, the job requirements will not take effect until 2029, so lawmakers who voted to waive their voters’ insurance were not responsible for the next two election cycles.
The claim to concerns about lazy people sitting at home to enjoy free Medicaid is a steak. The actual plan is to raise funds for tax cuts, which benefit wealthy people mainly by taking health insurance from people who have no other way to get health insurance.