Joe Did What? Obamacare

Claes Corneliszoon Moeyaert, “Hippocrates Visiting Democritus” (1636), via Eidolon.

I knew big things were intended to happen with our miserable health care provision system in the Biden presidency, and saluted the executive order of 28 January declaring a special open enrollment period for individual-market "Obamacare" policies from the healthcare.gov site, which started on Monday and goes on through mid-April, for people who have lost employer-based policies along with their jobs to the pandemic, that's maybe 7.7 million workers plus 7 million dependents, and perhaps some additional number who have been paying through the nose for COBRA extension of the employer policy they lost.

Now we're getting some information about further developments in the improvement of the Affordable Care Act through the gigantic Covid relief–and–budget reconciliation bill currently making its way through Congress, from a story this morning in Business Insider and their link to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which gives you some of the wonkery you may crave without making it more than I want to handle. I probably shouldn't include it under the "Joe Did What?" rubric, I think it comes from the House Ways and Means committee chaired by Rep. Richie Neal, but it's got some of that delightful surprise element—surprising to me, anyway, and possibly to you guys as well.

Joe Did What? Work as Punishment

Poster by Shephard Fairey, 2017.

 

One of the executive orders in that first extraordinary rush—is it three weeks ago now?—was to commission a review of the various Trump-era programs in various states for putting work requirements on Medicaid benefits, as if they thought not having a job in the cash economy was a kind of crime, and cutting off your access to a doctor was an appropriate punishment. Good thing! It was a terrible policy idea, not merely pointlessly cruel (these programs are meant to help out people who need help, not reward them for being virtuous) but also especially stupid, in that it's harmful to public health: one of the basic reasons for providing healthcare to those who can't afford it is to reduce the amount of disease to which everybody, rich and poor, is exposed.

The work requirements, a longstanding conservative goal, were a policy priority for Seema Verma, who ran the federal Medicaid program under President Trump. This was an about-face from the position of the Obama administration, which steadfastly opposed the idea of tethering public health benefits to work — something that had never happened in Medicaid’s nearly 60-year history. Obama administration officials repeatedly rejected states’ waiver requests, stating concerns that they “could undermine access” and that they did “not support the objectives of the Medicaid program.”

Et tu, Brute? Not exactly.

Moise Brutus.

Here's an inspirational tale being pushed by the rightwing wind machine, in today's Morning Bell from the Heritage Foundation: the story of Floridian Moise Brutus, who was 20 years old when a 2010 motorcycle accident left him a triple amputee and is now a college student and competitive cyclist in training for the 2016 Paralympics. The improbable villain of the story? Wicked big-government Medicaid! That is...