The proposal is a major shift in the 50-year-old program.
Y’all please reblog because this is fucking terrifying. It’s yet another attempt to sabotage any attempt at the poor receiving any kind of health care. God forbid you ever get fired and can’t declare yourself permanently disabled.
Make no mistake: people WILL DIE from this.
Contact your reps however you can. Use Resistbot and more importantly, just spread this shit around because I KNOW there’s a bunch of you on here that are directly affected by this.
Please share far and wide.
It’s murder. Murder by apathy. Murder by politics. Murder by making sick people choose between bankrupting their families or dying to save them from that fate.
There’s a reason why they’re doing this. Why they’re trying to bury the ADA. The ACA. Food stamps. Every social program.
They want to hoard even more money for the rich, for the military industrial complex, for themselves. And they’ll literally kill sick and poor people for that goal. Because we’re nothing to them. We’re not worth a damn thing. If we die? If we go bankrupt? Homeless? Starve? They don’t care. It’s a benefit for their desires to be richer if we’re dead.
This isn’t just politics. This isn’t policy differences. Calling it that santizes and disguises the truth: we, as a people, let other human beings die, starve, go bankrupt and homeless every single day. Those in power are just trying to expand that to more of us now.
If any of y’all think “this is murder” is an exaggeration… Let me paint you a picture.
My clients are all disabled, in some way or another. They all have a serious physical disability, chronic illness, or psychiatric diagnosis that prevents them from working. They are also all homeless. And every single one is on Medicaid.
And, I bet many of you didn’t know, but dictating who gets access to certain kinds of housing (specifically housing for people with serious mental illness- permanent housing) is in part determined by how high your Medicaid usage is.
So, where does this shit leave us? Well, first off, it leaves my clients without any kind of insurance. All of them need medication, all of them go to the doctor and/or hospital frequently. All of them rely on Medicaid. So add a work requirement to Medicaid, and where does that leave people who are physically and mentally incapable of working? Yeah. In the fucking dust.
Now, take away their Medicaid, and their chances of getting into permanent housing drop, too. So not only do they not have the means to get their medications and see their doctors and go to the hospital when they fucking NEED TO, now they no longer qualify for most of the housing that I am trying to get them into. So, they end up back on the street or in dangerous, overcrowded shelters with NO medication, NO doctors, NO hospitals, and almost no fucking chance of getting into housing because they have no Medicaid because they apparently need to work to have Medicaid and they CANNOT. FUCKING. WORK.
SO this is murder. This is murder of people like my clients, who rely on Medicaid and related services. This will be the death of hundreds if not thousands of Americans.
I don’t really have the energy for it, but I looked into things a little.
Kentucky, South Dakota, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Mississippi, Kansas, Indiana, and Arkansas are the 9 states I could find named as seeking the work requirement. [x]
Kentucky passed their requirement the day after the article link at the top of this post, on Jan 12th. [x] Indiana passed their’s on Feb 2nd. [x] Kansas seems to have possibly enacted this sometime late Jan, but could still be in the proposal stage. [x] Virginia is the most recent, in the past few days of late Feb. [x]
This IS happening. It’s not a posturing thing, or a goal they have. They are acting on it NOW.
Unless I get approved for disability this year, I won’t have health insurance next year. Like, I just won’t. Because Indiana doesn’t care about people who can’t work.
I applied for Medicaid this year after being uninsured because I am having some medical problems and I would really like to have them looked at. I am a full time student with two children and can not work right now. I applied in November.
By mid December I finally called them back to check on my status and they told me that I had to send some stuff in for proof of whatever. I sent it in.
In early February, I called back again to check. My male child (11) had been approved but myself and my daughter (13) had been denied. I reapplied for us both.
Last week I called back for my interview. I was told because I make over $200 a month (child support counts as income on Medicaid however it is not counted in the Marketplace insurances) I was denied coverage and was told to either apply to the Health Womens Program that Texas offers that only covers pregnancy and gyno visits (my medical problems are not in this area) or check the Obamacare plans.
The cheapest plan I could find was $400 with a $7k deductible.
So I remain uninsured.
If they pass this and require you to work but do not change the income requirements, they are basically forcing everyone, like me, who is able bodied but unemployed for whatever reason to become uninsured. It is going to force us to be in debt up to our eyeballs if we have to go to the doctor or hospital.
