No. of Recommendations: 14
Somebody who's already effectively disabled and not doing anything anyway is already in the program. Besides which, addicts in shelters are the very definition of Between the Cracks in the system. At any rate...every effort should be spent to get them to a state where they can be productive members of society.Lots of people have physical problems that make them unsuitable for many jobs, but aren't enough to qualify them for legal disability.
As for the addicts, and others that you characterize as Between the Cracks, I wholeheartedly agree that every effort should be spent to get them to a state where they can be productive members of society. Which is why it's so counterproductive that
Republicans are trying to stop that. These people need
enormous resources in order to fix what's keeping them from being productive members of society - access to health care to fix their physical ailments, access to quality mental health care to address those needs, access to child care so they can work, access to
housing so that they have a stable and secure place to keep clothes and food and other things that are pre-requisites to getting work, etc. Generally, fiscal conservatives don't want to provide these people with any of those resources on the government dime. That's certainly one position to take....but then, you can't expect that escape from being Between the Cracks if you're not helping them out. These people need enormous resources if they're going to turn their lives around.
And let's not lose sight of the other massive population we're talking about: people who meet the requirements but lose coverage because of the difficulty of satisfying the bureaucratic requirements of
proving they meet the requirements. Which is typically the overwhelming majority of people who will lose coverage when these things get imposed (KFF estimated it was between 60-80% of coverage losses when they looked at in in 2018):
https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/implicati...Sure. Except that this is an immovable goalpost and the fact is that there are addicts on Medicaid and people who could work...but choose not to.Right. There are people on Medicaid who don't deserve to be on Medicaid, and people on Medicaid who do deserve to be on Medicaid. Imposing a work requirement throws very large numbers of
both populations off the program....and also can be very damaging to people who aren't on Medicaid at all, but live in areas where their health care infrastructure will be severely damaged if the Medicaid program is contracted.
You can't filter out the deserving and undeserving from each other, because the process of making that kind of individualized assessment is not only itself very expensive, but also ends up throwing tons of deserving people off the program.
