The Truth about the National Debt and Medicaid Eligibility
In discussions about the politics surrounding the care of disabled people, I see repeated references to the national debt and to the large numbers of undocumented people who are supposedly receiving Medicaid benefits through fraud. I hope to dispel some common misunderstandings surrounding these topics.
Chris Bucholz wrote an article for Cracked entitled “5 Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Government Spending.” The first misconception that he corrects is the notion that governments are required to pay off their debts. Bucholz points out that when a private citizen retires, they are living off of their savings, investments, and whatever else they did to prepare. It is much harder to do that if the citizen owes money, so it behooves a person to retire debt free. Since governments in stable nations don’t retire, they can continue to accumulate debt indefinitely as long as the interest is paid. Bucholz says that most of the debt the American government accumulated in World War II is still there. If that debt was as serious a problem as politicians are fond of claiming, they would have fixed it in the eighty years that have passed since then. The reason they haven’t is that the misunderstanding creates a useful boogeyman when conservative politicians need to justify cutting programs they do not like. If you want more detailed information on this topic, Bucholz does an excellent job of laying it out in his article. For our purposes, the takeaway is that no one needs to be kicked off of any government program because the national debt is a problem. It isn’t.
Regarding Medicaid, I examined the eligibility requirements and the paperwork necessary to apply for benefits in my state. Those safeguards alone make it incredibly unlikely that we have massive numbers of undocumented people receiving unjustified benefits. By definition, undocumented people don’t have the documents needed to apply. Additionally, benefit systems in the United States are adversarial, in that the assumption is that the applicant is NOT eligible for benefits. The burden of proving otherwise lies with the applicant. While the specific requirements vary by state, my state requires the applicant to submit documentation proving that they are eligible for any one of the following reasons: low income; over 65 years of age; blind; otherwise disabled; have a dependent or family member in a care facility; pregnant. On top of all this, the applicant must supply a social security number. Undocumented folk don’t have those. In my state, it is virtually impossible for an undocumented person to obtain Medicaid benefits.
Medicaid is a complicated issue, because it is both state and federally funded, and some states offer benefits to eligible people regardless of immigration status. Snopes says that undocumented people in states that allow them to access healthcare benefits are not committing fraud. This tends to deflate the federal government’s argument that they are defeating “waste and abuse” by cutting funding to states that offer healthcare to undocumented people. Even if they were, it isn’t federal money that is being misappropriated. According to factcheck.org, states that cover undocumented people do so using state money only, as federal law prohibits disbursement of Medicaid funds to undocumented folk. The undocumented won’t be affected by these cuts; the President can’t withhold federal money from people who weren’t receiving it to begin with. Contrary to the Trump Administration’s claims that they are protecting Medicaid for deserving citizens, it is those citizens who will lose coverage when the cuts take effect.
When Donald Trump was banned from Twitter during the pandemic, COVID misinformation declined thirty six percent. Coupled with the more than fifty thousand lies he told during his first administration and the false assertions he has made regarding his cuts to Medicaid, it would be wise for those of us in the disabled community to take what the President says with a grain of salt regarding the “help” he is giving us. #Disability #MentalHealth #Depression #PTSD #Suicide #Trauma