I’m not going to waste a gift link to it, but today the New York Times is running an op ed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mehmet Oz, Brooke Rollins, and Scott Turner headlined “Trump Leadership: If You Want Welfare and Can Work, You Must.” A sample:

America’s welfare programs were created with a noble purpose: to help those who needed them most — our seniors, individuals with disabilities, pregnant women and low-income families with children.

In recent years, though, these welfare programs have deviated from their original mission both by drift and by design. Millions of able-bodied adults have been added to the rolls in the past decade, primarily as a result of Medicaid expansion. Many of these recipients are working-age individuals without children who might remain on welfare for years. Some of them do not work at all or they work inconsistently throughout the year.

The increased share of welfare spending dedicated to able-bodied working-age adults distracts from what should be the focus of these programs: the truly needy.

The great right-wing fantasy that has lived at least since LBJ initiated the Great Society program is there are vast numbers of deadbeats who are living off “welfare” instead of working. And if we got rid of welfare, they’d go out and get jobs and be perfectly fine. There is all kinds of authoritative data easily found via web search saying otherwise, of course.

This is from Axios:

By the numbers: There’s little evidence that people are somehow free-riding on Medicaid.

64% of adults with Medicaid work full time or part time, according to an analysis of census data by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. [That would be 44 percent full time, 20 percent part time]

Another 32% are taking care of home or family, are ill or disabled, attend school, or are retired.

2% could not find work. And there’s another 2% in an “other” category.

You can’t live on Medicaid. The beneficiary doesn’t see a dime of it. It just pays for medical care already received. Nobody is sitting around watching teevee all day and living off the Medicaid checks. According to the American Hospital Association, “Approximately 42% of Medicaid beneficiaries are adults, 36% are children, 10% are disabled, and 10% are age 65 or older.” So more than half of Medicaid recipients are children, seniors, or disabled.

The House “big, beautiful budget bill” now includes work requirements for receiving Medicaid. Axios reports that “The bill would require Medicaid recipients who are under 65 years old, without dependents, to confirm they are working at least 80 hours a month. Another provision requires some to certify twice a year that they qualify for insurance.” A few states have tried this, and I understand the administrative costs of checking up on the work requirements are prohibitive. In Georgia, Axios says, the state spent $13,000 per enrollee just to sign them up.  It’s probably more cost-effective to let a few deadbeats slip through. And a lot of people who should be able to qualify aren’t able to navigate the system.

Regarding Georgia, do read He Became the Face of Georgia’s Medicaid Work Requirement. Now He’s Fed Up With It. by Margaret Coker at ProPublica. A real Georgia Medicaid recipient who runs a small business was featured on state-sponsored video ads about what a great medical benefits program Georgia had. Since the ads aired the guy has lost his benefits twice because of bureaucratic red tape, and he’s fed up with it. You really need to read this. It appears the state is perpetually changing the work hour reporting procedures so that people make reporting mistakes and their benefits can be canceled.

And on that note, see Paul Krugman, Republicans Hate You.

Allow me to elaborate. If you struggle to pay your bills, if you have anxiety about your economic future, if the cost of housing and college and just ordinary living weigh on you all the time? There is nothing more important for you to understand than this: Republicans hate you. They think you’re lazy, they think you’re stupid, they think you don’t deserve anything better than to be a wage slave working your ass off so they and their billionaire buddies can have more servants and vacation houses and private jets, while they sit around laughing about what a sucker they think you are. They hate you.

I’ll go into detail on what this message accomplishes and why it’s so important, but first let’s consider this in context of what is probably the most abhorrent part of the budget bill: enormous cuts to Medicaid that would lead to millions of Americans losing their health coverage — as many as 14.7 million, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The primary way they will do this is through “work requirements,” i.e. forcing recipients to navigate a bureaucratic obstacle course to prove, over and over again, that they are working and therefore deserving of health coverage.

Work requirements are terrible policy, but what matters is why Republicans want to use them to kick all those people off their insurance. It’s because they hate people who need Medicaid. The same goes for those who might need food stamps or student loans, workers who want to bargain collectively, and pretty much anyone who isn’t lucky enough to be rich. They hate you.

I bolded that last paragraph because I think it’s true. They hate people who need benefits. Those people are a drag on the ability of rich people to not pay taxes.

Remember back during the depths of the covid pandemic, when the Senate had to debate relief checks? This is from Bess Levin, Vanity Fair, March 2020:

At some point on Wednesday, the Senate is expected to vote on a desperately needed $2 trillion coronavirus relief package. When that will happen is unclear, though, because a number of leading Republicans are demanding changes to the legislation, worried that it provides perverse incentives that could ultimately hurt the country. Do their concerns have to do with huge multinational corporations using the funds on buybacks? Insufficient aid to hospitals or low-wage workers unsure of how they’ll be able to afford food in a week? Not exactly! Rather, Senators Lindsey Graham, Ben Sasse, Rick Scott, and Tim Scott are sick with fear that the legislation will make unemployment so enticing that low-wage workers will decide to lay themselves off.

In the minds of these, um, people, those low-wage workers had better get their asses into the workplace, covid or no covid, and if some of them die that’s okay, but they can’t be allowed to not work!

Claiming the relief package will encourage people to stay out of the workforce, Graham told reporters that the bill “pays you more not to work than if you were working,” noting that it would provide the equivalent of $24.07 an hour in South Carolina versus the state minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. “If the federal government accidentally incentivizes layoffs, we risk life-threatening shortages in sectors where doctors, nurses, and pharmacists are trying to care for the sick, and where growers and grocers, truckers and cooks are trying to get food to families’ tables,” Graham, Sasse, and Scott said in a statement. Yes, it takes a real parody of a Republican to worry—at a time when a deadly pandemic is sweeping the nation and doctors are discussing the prospect of having to pick which patients get to live—about the possibility of being too generous to people making 1/1000000th of their annual salary.

See also Greg Sargent at The New Republic, Mike Johnson Just Wrecked Trump’s Ugly “Working-Class GOP” Scam. The current GOP bill creates a whole new benefit for wealthy investors. Greg Sargent explains it better than I can. The Tax Foundation analysis of the bill says that one effect of the bill will be to limit wage growth.

American incomes measured by Gross National Product (GNP) would increase by less than 0.05 percent because the deficit impact of the bill drives a wedge between the increase in economic output and the increase in American incomes. The tax provisions would increase the budget deficit by $3.3 trillion from 2025 through 2034 on a dynamic basis, and that higher budget deficit would require the US government to borrow more. As interest payments on the debt made to foreigners increase, American incomes decrease.

So it’s a terrible bill. At least I am also reading that a lot of Senate Republicans have some real issues with it, so there’s some hope it will be modified, I suppose. Josh Hawley, of all people, published another NY Times op-ed a couple of days ago headlined Don’t Cut Medicaid. Hawley dishonestly pretends that Trump wants Medicaid left alone —

Mr. Trump has promised working-class tax cuts and protection for working-class social insurance, such as Medicaid. But now a noisy contingent of corporatist Republicans — call it the party’s Wall Street wing — is urging Congress to ignore all that and get back to the old-time religion: corporate giveaways, preferences for capital and deep cuts to social insurance.

Trump has promised a lot of things, but it’s obvious the one promise he wants to keep is cutting taxes for the rich. If the little people have to suffer, too bad.

This wing of the party wants Republicans to build our big, beautiful bill around slashing health insurance for the working poor. But that argument is both morally wrong and politically suicidal.

Hawley isn’t stupid.

Now some 21 percent of Missourians benefit from Medicaid or CHIP, the companion insurance program for lower-income children. And many of our rural hospitals and health providers depend on the funding from these programs to keep their doors open.

That percentage would probably be a lot harder if the state didn’t make signing up so difficult. I swear the application form is endless.

All of which means this: If Congress cuts funding for Medicaid benefits, Missouri workers and their children will lose their health care. And hospitals will close. It’s that simple. And that pattern will be replicated in states across the country.

One of my constituents, a married mother of five, contacted me to explain why Medicaid is vital to her 8-year-old daughter, who depends on a feeding tube to survive. Formula, pump rentals, feeding extensions and other treatments cost $1,500 a month; prescriptions nearly double that cost. These expenses aren’t covered by private insurance. The mother wrote to me, “Without Medicaid, we would lose everything — our home, our vehicles and, eventually, our daughter.”

If Hawley puts up a meaningful fight to stop the Medicaid cuts, I might take back some of the bad things I’ve said about him. Not all of them, though.

Recommended read: Jamelle Bouie, They Were Waiting for Trump All Along.