Poverty is a moral failure, don’t you know? Being born rich is the only thing that washes away all sins (or is it that rich people are born without sin?), at least that’s the attitude of modern Republicans. Kentucky’s governor, though, has a solution for that. Like a child earning an allowance, Governor Matt Bevin devised a chart where people can earn points with good behavior and those points would help them cover health care costs.
The plan, which sounds more like a virtual punch card you might use at a Marriott, rather than one for attaining healthcare, is called “MyRewards Account.” MyRewards Account is a list of hoops that poor people have to jump through before they earn enough points to get dental or eye exams. Bevin is selling it as an expansion of benefits, when in reality, it’s a humiliating way to make the most basic human right of healthcare as a carrot with a huge stick attached to it.
The biggest change is Bevin’s proposal to charge premiums for Medicaid and impose an annual $1,000 deductible before the program covers beneficiaries’ health care costs. Those are big price hikes for people who can’t afford them. Similar policies have driven down insurance rates and harmed public health outcomes in other states already.
Source: Think Progress
The plan would give petty sums of money to be used toward healthcare benefits that Kentuckyians currently enjoy for doing things like try to find a job, when in fact, most Medicaid recipients do have jobs. It also rewards people for not smoking or for having “no inappropriate ER visits.” You’d better hope that isn’t really indigestion before claiming you might be having a heart attack.
CREDIT: Kentucky HEALTH Program Requirements Specification
Obviously, this intrusive and completely unjust plan has more than a few critics, including anyone who cares at all about personal liberties (isn’t that what these Ayn Rand humpers are all about?)
“This requires building a massive database about people’s individual behaviors, and then keeping it up. Never mind that it’s massively expensive, it also feels very invasive,” former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Andy Slavitt said in an interview. “I’m not sure the government should be tracking if I put on five pounds, or if I’m advancing in my job, or what grade I got on my GED exam.”
The party that doesn’t seem concerned at all that their president hasn’t even provided his tax returns see no hypocrisy in their insistence that the poor live under a microscope. The poor are not children who need constant suprevision, they are adults are deserve to be treated as such. Remember, Christians, Jesus was poor.
Featured image via Scott Olson/Getty Images
