By skyforbes 
I was recently on Medicaid for a year, because I’m a lazy, indigent bum who was looking for a free government handout while contributing absolutely nothing to society in return.
Actually, no…that’s not the reason at all. But Republicans like Paul Ryan would have you believe as much. That way, they can justify their crusade to phase out this critical program.
In fact, I was on Medicaid because I was in the final year of my master’s program in Seattle, which required me to complete an 11-month unpaid internship. I had also recently left my once-full-time job and its employer-sponsored health coverage. So when I went to Washington state’s health insurance exchange site and it asked about my income, I had to put $0, because…well, that was true at the time.
Which, of course, qualified me for Medicaid.
Now, I happened to live in a state that had embraced the Affordable Care Act and was committed to making it work, so my time on Medicaid there worked quite well. I was able to continue seeing the same doctor I always had, and I could do so without any deductibles or copays. In short, the minimal health care I needed during that year was free. (Cue the contemptuous gasps from the far right.)
And you know what? I’m not ashamed in the slightest to admit that. I’m a member of society who was doing something meaningful (probably more meaningful than anything Paul Ryan has ever done, going all the way back to his keg-guzzling days), even if I wasn’t earning a paycheck.
But what I hadn’t been doing anything particularly meaningful? Or what if not everyone agrees that I was? Who cares? I still deserve to be treated like a human being, not a caricature that a corrupt political party uses to push its poisonous ideology.
So does everyone else.
There are three faulty assumptions that Republicans use to justify their dogmatic opposition to public assistance programs like Medicaid.
Again, one is the notion that the only people who ever use such programs are indolent or helpless losers who just want to mooch off of the productivity of others. (Reference Paul Ryan’s infamous “makers versus takers” remarks, which he has since sort of disavowed, but not really.)
The second is the idea that you’re only contributing something useful to society if you’re gainfully employed.
And the third is the presupposition that private health insurance is inherently better than public coverage…and that you should only resort to the latter as a stopgap measure under the most desperate of circumstances.
Here’s Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday:
[The Republican health care bill] also ought to include tougher provisions on accountability…Medicaid is a welfare program. It’s primarily designed for the indigent elderly, the disabled, the blind, and children. It’s not designed for able-bodied adults. We want to get those people off of Medicaid, into a job, and into market-based insurance.
“Market-based insurance”? You mean the kind where insurance companies, their CEOs, and Wall Street make obscene profits while Americans continue to be crushed under the weight of their medical bills? Is that the kind of “market” you’re referring to, senator?
Private, “market-based” insurance is very often garbage. It’s also often just not an option for, say, full-time students. Or artists. Or authors. Or freelancers. Or long-term interns. Or religious practitioners. Or basically anyone who wants to do anything with their life besides earn a regular, steady paycheck at a 9–5 job that either includes benefits or pays you enough to purchase your own.
The Republican mentality on Medicaid is both immoral and deceptive — but if nothing else, this latest crusade represents an opportunity to call it out.
- You can be unemployed for a long period of time and still be doing something very valuable for yourself and others that doesn’t involve watching Netflix on the couch all day. (Full disclosure: I did watch Netflix while I was on Medicaid, but I reserved it for evenings after a hard day at my internship when I just wanted to tune out with a lighthearted romantic comedy…oh, yes, and a glass of Three Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s. After all, if I was suckling on the teat of Big Government, I certainly couldn’t justify buying expensive wine.)
- You can be an “able-bodied adult” who works very hard at whatever you do but still relies on Medicaid (assuming, of course, that you live in a state where it’s an option) because private insurance simply isn’t feasible.
- And if you’re like me, you can have a downright positive experience with Medicaid — better, in fact, than the experience you’ve had with some private insurance policies that bent over backwards to screw you over in the name of making a profit.
Medicaid and Medicare are two of the most important components of the American social safety net. It’s long past time that we merge the two together to create a single-payer system that administers health care coverage to everyone, regardless of income, employment, health, age, gender, or relationship status.
But if our lobbyist-owned lawmakers refuse to do that, we need to at least make sure that they don’t destroy what we already have by peddling falsehoods about the very important role that these government programs play for our citizens.