How Republicans will wage war on the poor
For years now, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has been talking in his earnest Wisconsin way about how much he cares about poverty. Republicans care about the poor, he insists, they just don't want to trap them in dependency — thus his proposals for a panopticon surveillance bureaucracy to coerce poor people into getting jobs and following bourgeois moral values.
But now that Donald Trump will become president with a Republican-controlled Congress, we're getting a vision of what that's actually going to look like in practice. It will be an all-out war on poor people's programs, without even a whisper of countervailing effort to help them get jobs or anything else.
First and probably most importantly, Republicans want to drastically roll back Medicaid. The first item on the agenda is repealing ObamaCare, which contains a large expansion of that program. If repealed in full, that would throw roughly 16 million people off the program at a stroke.
Second, they want to repeat the basic program of welfare reform on Medicaid. Welfare reform had three main prongs: block-granting the money to the states, capping spending so its size is eaten away by inflation every year, and sharp new restrictions on eligibility. This was justified in 1996 by a firestorm of vicious race-baiting about dependency, but its objective was obvious: to slowly obliterate the program. This goal has been mostly achieved. Enrollment in welfare has consistently fallen even during the Great Recession, and the block grant allows conservative states to bogart the money for things like anti-abortion agitprop. Overall, extreme poverty has increased by 150 percent as a direct result of this policy.
Now, Medicaid is already a (rather unwieldy) federal-state partnership, with substantial flexibility for defining benefits and eligibility — which, for conservative states, means "be as stingy as possible." Republicans, led by Trump's choice for secretary of health and human services, Tom Price, want to make it much easier for those states to kick people off the program, and slowly ratchet down spending just as happened with welfare reform. As Gene Sperling summarizes:
That's another roughly 14-21 million people kicked off Medicaid after 10 years — call it 30-35 million in total.
SOURCE: http://theweek.com/articles/669758/how-republicans-wage-war-poor
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For years now, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has been talking in his earnest Wisconsin way about how much he cares about poverty. Republicans care about the poor, he insists, they just don't want to trap them in dependency — thus his proposals for a panopticon surveillance bureaucracy to coerce poor people into getting jobs and following bourgeois moral values.
But now that Donald Trump will become president with a Republican-controlled Congress, we're getting a vision of what that's actually going to look like in practice. It will be an all-out war on poor people's programs, without even a whisper of countervailing effort to help them get jobs or anything else.
First and probably most importantly, Republicans want to drastically roll back Medicaid. The first item on the agenda is repealing ObamaCare, which contains a large expansion of that program. If repealed in full, that would throw roughly 16 million people off the program at a stroke.
Second, they want to repeat the basic program of welfare reform on Medicaid. Welfare reform had three main prongs: block-granting the money to the states, capping spending so its size is eaten away by inflation every year, and sharp new restrictions on eligibility. This was justified in 1996 by a firestorm of vicious race-baiting about dependency, but its objective was obvious: to slowly obliterate the program. This goal has been mostly achieved. Enrollment in welfare has consistently fallen even during the Great Recession, and the block grant allows conservative states to bogart the money for things like anti-abortion agitprop. Overall, extreme poverty has increased by 150 percent as a direct result of this policy.
Now, Medicaid is already a (rather unwieldy) federal-state partnership, with substantial flexibility for defining benefits and eligibility — which, for conservative states, means "be as stingy as possible." Republicans, led by Trump's choice for secretary of health and human services, Tom Price, want to make it much easier for those states to kick people off the program, and slowly ratchet down spending just as happened with welfare reform. As Gene Sperling summarizes:
That's another roughly 14-21 million people kicked off Medicaid after 10 years — call it 30-35 million in total.
SOURCE: http://theweek.com/articles/669758/how-republicans-wage-war-poor
.
