The rural white people who will die from this are mostly the “no-account” types who don’t vote. Althought that may change suddenly.
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Now just wait a damn minute! That is not true and you know it! The GOP is pro-life so they ain’t gonna kill nobody. Oh, crap! You’re right. The stupid dorks are pro-fetus. Never mind.
I doubt they know enough history to be aware of what happened during the time of the revolution. There was a revolution? In this country? Really? Oh yeah, but but. . . but. . .
Awareness of anything other than themselves is not in their repertoire. At all.
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An all volunteer work force is what the Repubs are shooting for. This is just the warm-up act.
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This action might also reduce the number of Republican voters who got these vipers into office. Ironic, isn’t it. Lost on those voters though. They will still blame the Democrats until their last breath.
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What about poor retirees? People in nursing homes? The disabled? WTF? Anybody know?
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The vicious cruelty, the utter pointlessness of it, is horrifying. Sickening. Such evil people, grinding their shiny shoes in the face of poor people.
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Likely the GOP (or Russia) have control of the vote and vote counting.
Work camps for the indigent. Who will never be anything but poor.
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More bricks piled up on the backs of rural health clinics and hospitals, who have already been damaged by GOP sabotage of the ACA.
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Poor retirees will be covered by medicare, until the half-trilion in cuts planned by the current GOP budget resolution go into effect. Everyone else, as I understand it, has a chance to navigate the bueaucracy and fill out a bunch of forms proving that they’re medically or otherwise unable to work.
Yeah, those forms haven’t been finalized yet, nor has the method by which they will be evaluated or submitted. And if you get denied care because someone in the state government (or perhaps a for-profit contractor) lost your forms or screwed up the evaluation, you can get reinstated soon as you win your court case. So the severely disabled poor will be least in a position to get care.
These measures are going to increase the death rate of the urban poor. There are people in my city who will never be able to hold a job. I can’t imagine forcing them to work. Many of them are too sick or mentally unstable to be employed or to be doing volunteer work. Depriving them of medical care will have them dying in the streets. Is this what the gruesome Republicans want?
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In short, yes. Longer version is that if you can prove to the gummint’s satisfaction that you’re disabled or otherwise unable to work, there’s an exception. The only hitch is that those are exactly the people who are not going to be good at filling out complicated forms, collecting a bunch of documentation from medical practitioners and showing up on time for personal interviews. At best they will need extensive help with those things, at worst they die.
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It’s even worse than that
“The revised law requires adult Medicaid enrollees who do not have a disability to work at least 20 hours per week in order to maintain their insurance.”
Disability has tightened up a lot in recent years. the system was never very generous in granting disability, but in the past few years has gotten ridiculous.
I have a patient who was run over by an 18-wheeler. She was in a coma for 3 months, she needed dozens of reconstructive surgeries to put her half-way back together, and she has literally hundreds of pieces of hardware in her body from these surgeries. She was on disability at first, a decade ago after her five years of reconstructive surgeries and rehab was finished, but she very unwisely decided to come out from under disabilty to try to work. She plugged away at it for a few years, but she was not qualified for any work that does not require at least some physical exerion, and there isn’t any physical exertion she can keep at for long without extreme pain. Her doctors at the time tried to “help” her in her desire to work by giving her ever increasing doses of opioids, which sort of worked at getting rid of pain, but only at doses so high that the opioids definitely work at getting rid of her ability to do anything that requires any cognitive ability. She lost the last job she was able to keep for more than a month years ago, not that any of those jobs included the insurance she needs to keep up with the medical care she needs.
So here we have someone who needs disability status to support her, and to allow medical coverage, and whose need is documented by literally hundreds of pieces of hardware physically demonstrabe on CT, and by ridiculous dose levels of oxycodone (I took over her care when she was on ludicrous dose levels, her present merely ridiculous levels are an achievement) that obviously and objectively are not compatible with any work imaginable – and she has been administratively rejected three times for disability.
Her lawyer says that this is the new standard practice. Every case, no matter how severe and objectively demonstrable the disability, is rejected administratively. You can appeal and go through the three admin rejections before you finally get the case heard by a judge who is bound to actually follow the law, and who therefore grants disability. But that’s years down the road. With any luck the applicant will have died by that time, or found some other way to manage, because the system does its level best to be more hellish than just living unaided with any disability less extreme than what happens to you if you survive being run over by an 18-wheeler. Even for that level of injury or illness, the system puts you through several years of Purgatory. God forbid we encourage people to get run over by 18-wheelers by making their lives after such an event just a little bit less hellish.
By current practice, how many people in Michigan do you think could qualify as disabled? Two or three, maybe. Next step? Go back and apply the new practice to people already granted disabled status back when the system was run by bleeding hearts. Yank the status from all of them and make them re-apply.
Please don’t accuse me of giving them ideas. They already think this way. The rest of us need to catch up with their thinking in order to anticipate their next moves.
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I need to figure out what I can do to help make Michigan blue again. #MMBA
I have no money to speak of so donations are out. I’m a generally unlikeable person, so campaign work involving personal contact isn’t a good idea. (Unless I go stealth and work a phone bank for the Republicans and drive people away.)
There must be something.
Both sides have a stake in making this out to be much more than it is. Republicans want to assure their base that they are being mean spirited. Democrats want to assure their base that the Republicans are being mean spirited.
The truth is that the new requirements will make almost no difference at all, but will be an expensive bureaucratic addition, whose only “benefit” will be the employment of more social workers doing useless paperwok, rather than helping folks. So, here are a few facts. First, the requirement does not relate to traditional Medicaid. Second, the requirement only applies to persons covered by the Obamacare expansion, which was expressly designed for the WORKING POOR, and their families. Thus, by definition these folks are already working or have a work history; so, for example, it covers families of four in Michigan above the traditional Medicaid cutoff up to an annual income to $33,000. Third, the requirement has exactly the kinds of exemptions that commenters here assume it doesn’t have, like the children in the family; those in training or education programs; the disabled; those with medical issues, including substance abuse; and those taking care of the disabled or children under 6 years of age. In addition, it has basically a “good cause” exemption that applies when none of the specific exemptions do.
Before anyone accuses me of being a heartless Trumpist, I want to make clear that I think these kinds of requirements are unnecessary and are designed to cause hatred and bigotry. I emphatically oppose them. But if they are the (temporary) price we have to pay to get Medicaid to the working poor, then I’m willing to do it.
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Gerrymandering is an issue with regard to the Michigan state legislature, but with regard to the governor, Michigan is in the same situation as Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—far too few of the people who would benefit directly from Democratic governance vote in years other than Presidential years, and those are the years the legislature and governor are elected.
Jimmy Breslin said it best: “The poor can never be made to suffer enough.”
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Snyder is a subhuman fit only for medical experimentation or organ harvesting.
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