By GLEN BIEGEL
The left has declared war on those who would place work or service requirements on those who receive Medicaid and are able-bodied.
The statements made against any who support the work or service requirement are powerful and clear. You are killing people. You are taking away the way of life of Alaskans. You are stealing folks’ healthcare. Let’s review each of these claims and then look at the idea of an able-bodied person receiving a permanent benefit from the view of our declaration of independence and from our religious and moral duty to the poor.
Let’s look at these claims: First: “You are killing people.”
Those who have regular employment live longer than those who do not have regular employment.
- Unemployed individuals have a 63% higher risk of death compared to employed peers—after adjusting for confounders.
- Employment can lead to an increase in life expectancy of up to 10 years, depending on race, gender, and age.
How about: “It is a way of life for Alaskans to be on Medicaid and requiring work or public service is taking away that lifestyle.”
In Alaska, a strong majority of Medicaid adults are already working. According to a recent KFF state fact sheet:
- In Alaska 72% of adult Medicaid recipients are employed:
- 49% full-time
- 23% part-time
- Only 28% are not working.
How about: “You are stealing up to 1/3 of Alaska’s healthcare”
While 32% of Alaskans are on Medicaid, very few are threatened by the work or public service requirements in the BBB.
In fact: Only 8% of Alaska Medicaid recipients fall under the not working or looking for work categories.
That means that 2.6% of Alaskans will have to either get work, look for work, get training, or perform some kind of public service to receive the benefit. Not 1/3, but less than 1/33rd.
Now to the real question for Alaska and for the US which has to do with our national vision when founded, and whether it is right to ensure able-bodied people earn what they get in life in some way.
From the view of an American citizen: If we are given something, are we not beholden to that system, do we not organize our life around the requirements of that ‘ruler’? Do we want to have Medicaid as our ‘King’? A couple phrases from our declaration of independence shed some light on the founding principle of America:
“Give me liberty or give me death.”
“That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”
“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
The themes of the declaration reveal our ultimate goals of individual liberty, moral agency, and the duty to act against injustice.
Is it an injustice to require work or public service for the able-bodied? I will close with this thought from Thomas Aquinas, a Catholic Saint, one of the wisest and most thoughtful people ever born:
“For nothing is more foolish than that in this present life, where men ought so to work that they may live eternally, men should live in idleness. It is great folly to live in idleness in this life; because from idleness, as from an evil teacher, we learn evil knowledge; because through idleness we come to lose the good that lasts forever; because through the short idleness of this life we incur a labor that is eternal.”
As always, Aquinas settles the issue and places the Medicaid war as a struggle between good and evil. When you hear Facebook and YouTube ads telling us that a person must persist in their idleness but still receive goods from the State, you can know that this is the eternal play of good and evil. It is good to require public service or work for society, but especially for the able-bodied recipient of Medicaid.
Glen Biegel is a technology security professional, Catholic father of nine, husband to a saint, and politically active conservative.
