Pearl River         The Republican proposal to finance extended tax benefits for the rich by cutting health and other benefits for lower income and working Americans is a two-pronged attack.  Work requirements are part of it, and the other part is putting people in a paperwork prison.

Keep in mind, this is all about pushing people off of benefits.  The smokescreens are the claims about encouraging work and preventing fraud.  Both of these arguments crumble in the face of the facts.

Interestingly, Arkansas, having tried both, is proof of the fiction and, for the Republicans, author of the plan that pointed out how to pushout eligible people from benefit programs.  As the Times summarized in an editorial:

Federal law already allows states to impose Medicaid work requirements in some situations, and Arkansas briefly did during the first Trump administration. Subsequent studies found no resulting increase in work force participation. Most of those subject to the work requirements already were working, and the termination of benefits did not address the reasons the remainder were not.  The primary effect of the Arkansas program was to strip Medicaid from people who were eligible. The work requirement was mostly a paperwork requirement. It punished people for failing to fill out forms. Two-thirds of those who lost coverage in Arkansas were victims of red tape, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank.

Can’t hide the hands of the folks who are throwing these rocks.

I’ve talked about a way to offset some of the damage of the work requirement, if we could get to scale with voluntarism.  We also need a paperwork patrol.  Many of these work requirement volunteers could also be marshalled to help people navigate the bureaucratic maze for benefit application, retention, and appeals in order to continue to receive benefits.

The federal government knows what to do and pays for it when it wants Americans to access programs.  The navigator program that helped launch the enrollment under the Affordable Care Act made that clear, just as these new proposals make the opposite true.  Arkansas being ground zero in opposing benefits, was clear then as well about blocking access when it banned any expenditure of funds by the health department alerting people to the program.

The government won’t be providing support for people to meet the challenge of these new rules, but there might be some ways to turn this around as well.  When I was an organizer with the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) more than 55 years ago, we had what were essentially grievance committees, taking a page from labor unions, but what some of the recipients really did was act as jailhouse lawyers, expert in the ways and means of the welfare department and its rules.  They were navigators and advocates.  We often won the right to have a table in the welfare office, manned by recipients, who did nothing but help other recipients sort out problems and help eligible newbies navigate the process to access benefits.  No WRO organizers knew as much about the welfare system in the cities and states where we worked as some of the recipients did.  My point is simple.  People could be trained and deployed everywhere to help people apply and retain benefits.  With some having computer skills, their impact could be even larger.

Other doors worth knocking would be these law firms, big and small, and their pro bono claims.  Something close to a billion has been pledged by huge law firms that were bullied by Trump.  Conservative groups and individuals are independently trying to reach out to these firms and others seeking millions of dollars in commitments for pro bono work for their purposes.  Hundreds of firms have also pledged that they would stand against these attacks.  What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.  Requests should be made across the board for pro bono assistance from law firms to handle denial appeals on the back end and breakdown barriers to the front end of the application process.

Putting together effective resistance in these ways is like the shop floor tactic of “working to rule.”  We offset the punitive purposes of these rules.  The ways are clear, if we could put together the means to prove the point and get to scale across the country.