Marble Falls       It would be grossed attack on the poor to cut Medicaid and food benefits in order to benefit the rich.  President Trump says that.  He promises that his domestic policy and budget bill won’t cut these programs and that Medicaid is sacrosanct.  Gaslighting by Trump and the Congressional Republicans in the House and Senate is too kind a word for this horror.  It’s like dropping someone in a lion’s den, and claiming you didn’t hurt him, because he had a chance to escape.  Here, all of the savings are going to be accomplished by creating a paperwork work nightmare of additional certification requirements.  The so-called savings are cuts, just paper cuts.  Just another rationale of lies in the skin of a reason.  The difference is that everyone who looks at this big bad budget bill knows what’s happening, even as one lie gets bigger than the next one.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office makes no bones about it.  The paper cuts will force 11.8 million more Americans to become uninsured by 2024.  Federal spending on Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act would be reduced by $1.1 trillion with more than $1 trillion of the cuts in Medicaid alone.  That’s the unvarnished truth we’ve been yelling from the roofbeams in recent weeks.

Exactly how are they mandating these changes so far.  A report in the Times sketches it out pretty clearly:

Here are a few specific examples of new tasks people would be asked to complete if the bill became law:

• Instead of allowing states to use existing information to verify citizenship and income for people trying to qualify for Obamacare subsidies, those individuals would be required to submit documents and would have less time to apply.
• Individuals using Medicaid would need to prove they are eligible for the program twice a year instead of annually.
• “Able-bodied” Americans aged 60-64 on food assistance would be required for the first time to meet work requirements.

The key word here is that these are “a few specific examples.”  There are more coming, and each state will have a crack at building the wall higher and higher with permission from the feds.

A look at what will push more people off would include,

Nearly a dozen changes to the Obamacare enrollment process in the House bill are estimated to reduce insurance coverage by around four million people. More than seven million people are estimated to lose Medicaid because of a series of administrative requirements, including the twice-a-year renewals and a new program that would require poor adults to prove to state officials that they are working a minimum number of hours. An expansion of work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is expected to mean that about three million fewer people will receive aid.

All of this is happening in the foreground, but in the background it’s worth remembering that countless studies over many years have found that adding onerous work requirements does not in fact mean that more people are forced to work.  An expert with the Urban Institute says that all of this is a misnomer.  These should be called “work reporting” requirements, not “work requirements.”

In a “how low can you go move, where now food stamp recipients are automatically qualified for free school lunches for their children, these new draconian proposals would also push families of off food assistance, forcing them to make separate applications for school lunches.  Republicans would push out about 420,000 children with that sneak attack.

As the reporter notes as well,

Complying with those reporting requirements can be especially hard for low-income workers who work multiple jobs with inconsistent hours. These workers are also less likely to have access to human resource departments that produce documents needed to comply — or the computers, scanners and printers necessary to duplicate and submit them.

Of course, if this mess emerges as law, the point after all is making the process of receiving any benefits by eligible individuals and families somewhere between hard and impossible, the devil take the hindmost, and let death and starvations follow, while the rich do the happy dance.