My partner, 47, was on Medicaid the last 3 years while working. His job got eliminated in 2021 after Covid so he was out of work for a bit. Then he got a part time job at Wal Mart, and his wages (or lack thereof) had him qualified for Ohio’s Medicaid. Then he was laid off from Wal Mart. Then he got a part-time job at Home Depot, and once again his wages had him qualified for Ohio’s Medicaid. Then, thankfully one of the full-time guys in his department pulled a knife on a customer and was fired so now he’s full time and off Medicare.
He definitely wasn’t trying to shirk working to be on Medicare. But when all you can get is part time work, you’re going to qualify.
Based purely on anecdotal observations, my WAG is that the worst abuse occurs in the SSDI system. I know a few people on SSDI who are complete frauds. It angers me to see it, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
Here’s something that happens sometimes, something lots of people don’t think about until it happens to them or someone they know.
You get seriously sick - a cancer diagnosis, maybe - or injured and, because of that event you can’t work anymore.
You lose your job.
Being both seriously incapacitated and recently unemployed, you can’t afford to keep your insurance under COBRA and even if you can, that option is time limited.
You lose your insurance, that insurance you paid into for years even though you used it for little more than your annual check-ups.
You end up having to apply for Medicaid, because now that you really need it your insurance you’ve had all these years is suddenly useless and the other options are prohibitively expensive.
This is a dynamic that plays out all the time, and the big flaw in the “employer provided insurance” paradigm is you only get that insurance when you’re healthy enough to work.
The Republicans are conflating cause and effect, it’s not that healthy people aren’t working because they have Medicaid as an insurance option, it’s that people are going on Medicaid because they lose their insurance because they aren’t healthy enough to work.
The premise doesn’t even make any sense. I could see claiming that there are young, able-bodied men on food stamps, trading their benefits for hookers and blow or something, but Medicaid? How does the scam even work? You fraudulently get on Medicaid and then, uh, see a doctor when you’re sick? Whoa, you’re rolling in it now!
It’s obviously all a lie being used to cut benefits and to make it more difficult for people who do qualify to get them (many of whom will likely lose benefits for having the wrong kind of job, or the inability to properly fill out paperwork, or whatever). But, they should at least try and make up something that seems plausible.
Not sure of his definition of not working. Generally people on Medicaid are working, they just need to be at roughtly 200% of poverty level or below.
I asked AI. Many people can just get by on the hours they work, and cannot afford the company rate of health insurance: Yes, some Walmart workers are on Medicaid, and Walmart is among the top employers with a large number of employees receiving Medicaid benefits. Studies have shown that Walmart and McDonald’s are among the largest employers of Medicaid beneficiaries.
If you want to understand the modern republican party you need to understand cluster B personality disorders like NPD and ASPD. So for one thing, you can’t trust anything they say because they’re pathological liars.
For one thing, in every other wealthy nation on earth everyone gets health care and health insurance. Nobody cares if you work or not, or if you’re able bodied or not, or how old you are. So it doesn’t matter.
Even if there are 4.8 million able bodied adults on medicaid, that doesn’t mean none of them are working. You can work a low wage job and not earn enough to qualify for an ACA plan, or your employer may not offer health insurance. It happens all the time.
Also, medicaid spending, like all health insurance, depends on who you’re insuring. Able bodied adults do not cost that much to insure compared to the elderly or the disabled.
Even if you assume it costs $6000 per year to insure an able bodied adult per year, that is 30 billion a year. I’m more than happy to help pay 30 billion a year in taxes to make sure 5 billion people have health insurance.
Basically, its an attempt to turn medicaid back into what it was before the ACA, a program that doesn’t cover low income people unless they are children or disabled.
This! OTTOMH USAid was doing a good job at providing people in crappy countries food and medical care. It had some value as an intelligence gathering tool. But mostly all those people could give back to the United States was thanks and good will.
For Trump and those who believe as he does, that is not enough. All relationships are transactional. Providing food and medical care and not getting anything concrete back is a waste. Protecting democracy in Ukraine without them signing over mineral rights is a waste. Funding research to fight cancer is a waste.
If you want to be really cynical, it’s only value to the United States was as an intelligence gathering tool.
Providing people with food and medical care and in return getting thanks and good will are just not seen as valuable by these idiots who have no understanding of history.
I agree. Although Trump and the rest are without compassion or empathy, they should still see the strategic value here. Other Dopers have pointed out that China will step in to provide aid to these countries. They will also provide a steady stream of propaganda. It will start out very mild and start subtle. Eventually, these countries will be filled with people who rabidly support China and just as rabidly hate the USA.
Interestingly enough, I was curious about what DOGE has done about Medicaid. It looks like they haven’t done anything except go over tons of sensitive medical data that should have been protected by HIPAA.
You’d think that if there was all this fraud in Medicaid, that DOGE would have found it by now.
one of the full-time guys in his department pulled a knife on a customer and was fired so now he’s full time and off Medicare.