Ron Johnson (R senator from State of Confusion) sez: “You’re talking about 4.8 million able bodied workers, young men, for example, who are on Medicaid and not working. They are choosing not to work when they can. That is called fraud. They are cheating the system. When you root out those kinds of abuses, you save the resources that are so desperately needed by the people who deserve it and need it most. That’s what we’re doing, and that’s why this is a morality of what we’re doing here is precisely right”. Curious as to who they might be and where he got this (so-called) statistic?
Sounds “truthy” to me.
Probably the sons of all those welfare queens.
The second part of your question is easy. They took the number of “young” people on Medicaid, however they define young, and assumed that most if not all must be able-bodied men who choose not to work. How does he or anyone know that they are choosing not to work? To be on Medicaid don’t you have to have a doctor say you are unable to work? Are all the doctors in on this too?
There is likely some fraud in Medicaid, I’m not saying there isn’t, and somebody should be rooting that fraud out, but to assume that almost everyone is committing fraud sounds like B.S. to me. He’s just telling his MAGA supporters what they want to here, and why we should cut back on programs like Medicaid.
No. In states that took the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, Medicaid eligibility is purely income-based, with no concern about why your income is low, regardless of your age.
But the idea that there’s a sizeable population of voluntarily unemployed young men who are not only enrolled in Medicaid but using it so much that it’s a major contributor to their lifestyle is obviously bunk.
I have a friend who is “young” I suppose at 47 and is on Medicaid. In part because he has been trying to get both a knee replacement and some other issues either taken care of so that he can work again or to go on to SSDI. If the entire system would stop screwing with him he could at least be working again and not in constant pain from his destroyed knee. But he can’t even get that.
And we should not allow Mr. Johnson to continue to tell the lie that it’s Medicaid recipients that the government is paying.
That’s one year younger than me.
I’ve still got a couple decades of work in me.
Being too injured to work is legitimate though. A big part of what my work does is support those people. Now, fraud does certainly happen because we have a whole department of fraud investigators (I support a number of them and hear stories). That’s a tiny percentage though of the people collecting benefits.
I they’re able-bodied, then they won’t have much in the way of medical expenses. How much fraud can there be paying the medical bills of people who aren’t sick?
That’s a curious question, given that Medicaid does not pay patients.
I was on Medicaid (as well as Medicare, SNAP, and Social Security Disability) for over twenty years. I was inded able bodied during that time. I was also suffering from chronic, severe, treatment resistant depression, general anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder and a few other things. As soon as I was mentally able to apply for, get and keep a full time job I did.
From what I have seen, there is a lot of fraud on an excedingly small scale. For example, somebody is making a hundred dollars a month in cash doing odd jobs. Terrified that any income will result in their benefits being slashed, they never report this income. Investigating and proving this kind of fraud would cost much more money than it would save, Additionally, all the workers I dealt with at the various government agencies have been sympathetic to people in miserable situations who cannot work and legitimately need their benefits even if they have a small amount of unreported income. You would need to find people willing to punish the people who are technically commiting fraud.
A has been said, this is another iie told just to get voters to hate other people.
Well,duh, of course they are. Why woudln’t they be when those welfare queens are getting paid by the government to have more babies?
And why should the magaflatearthers in general and in government rely on a doctor for determining if someone has a disability or needs medical treatment? That reminds me of this Pearls Before Swine strip from this past Sunday.
People on Medicaid are not getting rich on this scheme.
In fact the truth that they qualify will tell you that.
Same with all government benefit recipients.
You ain’t eating high on the hog with Snap. Or traveling extensively with your social security.
Just not happening. On a huge scale.
Given who is making this pronouncement, and the values he represents, I’m guessing that Johnson believes all the “young men” he is referring to here would fail the brown paper bag skin colour test. Which, in his world, is an automatic disqualification for any form of social assistance.
If they know who the able bodied people are, why don’t they just shut them off? Same with the 2000 year old Social Security recipients. Why are they crying about it?
Because the ‘’‘’‘waste, fraud, and abuse’‘’‘’ is cover for gutting the programs.
Hilarious that complaints about people “failing to contribute” are coming from Ron Fucking Johnson, one of the most genuinely worthless, useless human beings on the entire goddamn planet.
What are you objecting too?
These (fictional, nay, delusionary) healthy but lazy young men are enrolled in Medicaid and therefore have access to free taxpayer-supported medical treatment they do not deserve. To the degree any of them partake of medical care, which bills are paid by the taxpayers instead of the thieving healthy young fraudsters, a fraud has been committed. Whether a penny of cash ever passes through the young mens’ hands is immaterial; they got something of value from the taxpayers under false pretenses.
The logic of that is 100% legit & correct.
The problem of course is that the actual numbers of such people are a) vanishingly small as a percentage of the total Medicaid patient count and financial outlay, and b) The RW talking heads outraged about this have no evidence of how many of these people there are . Other than some made-up large number to fig-leaf their attacks on the entire idea of public assistance of any kind for anyone for any reason.
That was more my point. If we had proper universal health care, his problems would be taken care of because we’d all be in the system. If the system we have actually worked properly, his knee at least would be fixed and he could go back to doing the sort of work he had been doing for another twenty years or so. Instead he’s been scraping along on the help of friends while having zero income because one of the absurdities of the system is that you can’t work while trying to get disability but he can’t get the help that might make it possible for him to abandon the claim.
A system that will do a knee or hip replacement on someone in their 80s and not someone in their 40s who could keep working and with a much better quality of life is absurd.
Butbutbutbut My brother’s neighbor’s cousin works at Wal-Mart and saw someone at the next register paying for t-bones with SNAP!