Opinion: Republicans can’t destroy the safety net. So they’re making it an instrument of misery.
Elizabeth Cloinger, who was tossed off of the Arkansas Works program, holds a pill bottle she hasn't refilled since 2017. That's her 3-year-old granddaughter. By Paul Waldman Paul Waldman Opinion writer covering politics Email Bio Follow Opinion writer March 27 at 2:27 PM In many ways, America gets more liberal all the time. While you can see it vividly on issues such as marriage equality where rapid change is obvious to just about everyone, it can also come up in surprising ways.
To see what that war produces, I refer you to an absolutely brutal account by Amy Goldstein of a program Arkansas has instituted with the blessing of the Trump administration to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. But on Aug. 18, she received another letter, saying she had been terminated because she had not verified her income. In December, four letters arrived saying she needed to update her email address, then 11 more in January. Each letter told her to create an online account. She doesn’t have a computer and didn’t realize that the program requires everyone to get an email address.
Last year, the administration sent a letter to every state Medicaid director, urging them to enact work requirements so they could do the same thing to their own poor citizens that Arkansas has done to theirs. Kentucky’s work requirements have been held up by a lawsuit, Indiana’s are getting started, and programs in Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Michigan and Arizona are on their way. Other Republican-run states can’t wait to join.
Conservatives plainly see it as the latter. But more to the point, if it’s politically impossible to just take all government health care away from people, they’ll do what they can to make sure it comes with a dose of suffering and shame. You’ll have to navigate a bureaucratic maze to prove you’re worthy of the benefit, with the possibility of losing it always there — which adds stress and anxiety to people whose lives are already saturated with both.
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