Subject: Re: The Republican Health Care System
That's certainly wrong. And possibly very wrong.

Not according to the CBO.

There are a lot of people who benefit from Medicaid who are not physically disabled, but lack the ability to regularly work. For example, if you head down to your local homeless shelter, you will find a non-trivial number of people who could not go out and get employed even if they wanted to. They lack suitable clothing, they lack suitable hygiene, they lack transportation, they lack a home address for paperwork, they lack any kind of job history. They may be presently addicted to substances that make them utterly unsuitable for work. They may have physical or mental issues that do not rise to the level of disability (or which they can't afford to have diagnosed by a medical professional as constituting a disability), but which make them unsuitable for work. Etc. Plenty of other people who suffer from the same lack of social or physical capital (especially in rural areas) who are simply not capable of getting to a job and performing it regularly.

Aaaaaand these aren't the people being targeted with the work requirements.
BTW you're also highlighting the abject Failure of what's colloquially known as the "Homeless Industrial Complex".

Living here in True Blue Seattle, I get a ringside seat to "Harm reduction" and all the factors that have been brought into play that perversely keeps these people in exactly the same state. Until they eventually OD, btw.

There are also a lot of people that have familial situations that make them unable to go to work - they are caregivers for the elderly, other disabled household members, or for children that are not legally their dependents.

And these numbers are very unlikely to be in the millions of people, despite what the democrats would say.

The reason that some rural GOP members are upset at the proposal is that they know a non-trivial number of their constituents fall into these categories - they're currently on Medicaid but aren't going to be able to meet the requirements. Which means that the rural hospitals and medical community that currently treat these folks are going to end up their finances blown to shreds when they get thrown off the program - not only do they lose the revenue, but many of these folks will still need to be treated anyway. And because so many of these people can't work - not choose not to but can't - there's nothing that the state can do to get them working.

You're ignoring why that is. The hint is that the drug problem in rural areas is just as bad as it is in the cities. Plus, the way to fix the problem in rural areas is not to increase the amount of public dole but rather to reconstitute many of the industries that have been outsourced to other places.

The way forward is actually pretty simple: We can't afford to stay on the trajectories we're on and things need to change.