Bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake: Why work requirements for Medicaid do not represent a reasonable

Bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake: Why work requirements for Medicaid do not represent a reasonable healthcare compromise

It’s one of the great and bitter ironies of our modern American policy debates that it is conservatives who are often the chief architects of the largest and least useful government bureaucracies.

No, this is not intended as a dig at the military or our departments of transportation.

Think about it for a minute: What is the chief function of our public bureaucracies? As anyone who has ever paid a visit to their local Social Security office or argued with a school secretary over a student’s eligibility for a reduced price lunch can attest, the answer (at least when it comes to safety net programs) is to jealously guard and carefully mete out public resources. If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid such experiences, think for a moment of your health insurance company and all of the people and bureaucratic process and jargon it takes to assess your occasional claims. Now, think of what that process would be like if you were a low-income person with limited education trying to access some basic assistance that might keep you from becoming homeless.

Especially in the last few decades, as conservatives have raised ideological heck about supposed abuses of every public program from unemployment insurance to Medicaid to SNAP benefits, large and distrustful new bureaucracies have arisen to carefully pore over every application for assistance and monitor every program beneficiary to make sure that no one receives a penny more than the law allows.

Read more: http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2018/01/23/bureaucracy-bureaucracys-sake-work-requirements-medicaid-not-represent-reasonable-healthcare-compromise/