What you wrote would be laughable if it weren't so sad and cruel. You contend that poor states like West Virginia would provide health services for their poor, absent Medicaid. You don't know that -- and the notion is ridiculous, but you throw it out there as an excuse for selfishness. Before Medicaid, the poor couldn't get health insurance nor adequate health care. That is why Medicaid was created -- as a reaction to the poor conditions that existed. But you think that eliminating Medicaid will miraculously give the poor states the push they need to create their own program. That view is either naive or woefully dishonest.
Con's opposition to programs helping the less fortunate, from food stamps to Medicaid, is usually framed in monetary terms. It's along the lines of when Senator Orrin Hatch, was challenged about Congress’s failure to take action on the Children’s Health Insurance Program, that covers nearly nine million children. Hatch declared that "
the reason CHIP’s having trouble is that we don’t have money anymore" -- right before voting for one of the largest tax-cuts in history.
But is Con's and GOP's opposition really about the money? No, it’s about the cruelty. This cruelty isn't a bug, it's a feature of his/their conservative ideology. This has become crystal clear over the past few years that the suffering imposed by Republican opposition to safety-net programs is designed to inflict cruelty while not saving money. Remember Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act? The Supreme Court allowed states to opt out of this expansion. But accepting expansion should have been a no-brainer for every state: The federal government would
initially pay the full cost, and even in the long run it would pay 90% -- not only caring for citizen's health but bringing money and jobs into state economies. Yet 18 states, all of them with Republican-controlled legislatures, governors or both,
still haven’t expanded Medicaid. Why? There is no explanation except that conservatives simply don’t want lower-income families to have access to health care and are actually willing to hurt their own states’ economies to deny them that access.
DP's own Conservative would probably reply that taking away this benefit would force those freeloaders to get jobs, so I'll beat him to the punch. The reality is that a vast majority of adult Medicaid recipients are in families
where at least one adult is working, and the rest are either disabled; caregivers to other family members or students. The population of Medicaid recipients who "ought" to be working but aren’t is very small, and the money that states could save by denying them coverage is trivial.
More on these lines is the GOP's effort to weaken Obamacare.
The GOP's sabotage of the Affordable Care Act will lead to 6.4 million fewer Americans with health insurance, while the federal bill for coverage rises by some $33 billion per year.
This is yet another example of the differences between the two parties. Democrats want to strengthen the social safety net; Republicans want to weaken it -- even if it costs more money.
eace
