opinion

Here's why Michigan Medicaid work requirements will kill people | Kaffer

Michigan Sen. Wayne Schmidt (R-Traverse City) represents Cheybogan County, where unemployment is high, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics: around 20.9% in February. Schmidt also represents Chippewa County, where unemployment was about 10.5% that month.

But unlike Medicaid recipients elsewhere in Michigan, the residents Schmidt represents are unlikely to be harmed by SB 897, a piece of legislation the senator co-sponsored. Approved by the state Senate on party lines last week, the bill would require recipients of Medicaid to prove they work 30 hours a week to retain their health-care coverage.

That 2.5 million Michiganders — nearly a quarter of our state's population —receive health care coverage through traditional Medicaid or the Healthy Michigan Medicaid expansion, and that 60% of adult Medicaid recipients who aren't disabled are working, and that requiring working adults who live in poverty to document what may be sporadic or seasonal work hours presents a significant hardship, don't seem to make no nevermind to Schmidt and his Republican colleagues in the state Senate.

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Because although HB 897 threatens to end Medicaid benefits for hundreds of thousands living elsewhere in the state, it includes exemptions for people who live in counties with an unemployment rate of more than 8.5%, like the ones Schmidt represents.

Live in Detroit? You're out of luck.

The city's unemployment rate is higher than 8.5%, but the unemployment rate in surrounding Wayne County is just 5.5% — meaning Detroiters living in poverty, with a dysfunctional transit system that makes it harder to reach good-paying jobs, won't qualify for that exemption. The same is true in Flint and the state's other struggling cities.

Get that? Rural residents of up-north counties with high unemployment are protected; urban Michiganders who live in high-unemployment cities in more prosperous counties are left to twist.

This is what's called "political cover." It's also one of the ways legislators skillfully pit urban and rural Michiganders with common interests against each other.

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And it's just one of the gross things about this bill, which is widely expected to pass both the House Appropriations Committee, which is scheduled to take it up Wednesday, and the full chamber.

The fact is, if SB 897 causes 20% of Medicaid recipients to lose their benefits as the bill's sponsor, Sen. Mike Shirkey (R-Clark Lake) projects, some of them will die.

"Every one of these reasons to deny you healthcare kills people," Paul Propson, CEO of Covenant Community Care in Detroit, a primary health care provider that sees 20,000 patients with Medicaid benefits or no insurance coverage each year, told me last month. "It might only kill 10 people or 50 people or 100 people, but when there are delays in accessing health care, there are victims."

The bill's Senate sponsors admit that this proposal isn't about saving money; in fact, it'll cost about $30 million a year to administer the program.

It's pitched, instead, as a firm-but-gentle hand to those who've become dependent on the teat of government dependency. In the benevolent scenario articulated to Lansing news service Gongwer by GOP lawmakers like Shirkey and Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof (R-West Olive), it's a push toward the path of self-sufficiency, and insurance that the state has the resources to help those who really need it.

(Sen. Patrick Colbeck, R-Canton, who is a gubernatorial candidate, told Gongwer that there were 31,000 job openings within an "easy commute" of his district. Colbeck, an Islamophobe and general holder of screwy beliefs, failed to mention that Canton opts out of SMART, the regional bus system. Commuting how, Senator?)

And that's really the problem with this magical thinking: It does not account for the complexities of the real world. It's feel-good nonsense for the bootstrap set that will, almost certainly, cost lives.