New Orleans We are hours away from a curtailment of food stamp benefits, short of an 11th hour intervention, which seems unlikely. We are months and days away from the imposition of more putative requirements for food stamps and Medicaid involving 80-hours per month of work, community service, or education in order to receive benefits, regardless of a family’s income eligibility. The draconian mission of Trump’s big, bad, budget bill is to push millions off of these programs using bureaucratic procedures, increased eligibility checks, and new rules and requirements for additional groups of beneficiaries.
States aren’t ready to absorb these changes, which are not only unfunded mandates, but involve onerous penalties for the states based on their “error” rates in implementation and distribution to recipients, that would force them to pony up yet more money that many simply don’t have in their budget. The cumulative effect of all of this will be an avalanche of misery pyramiding one crisis for lower income families on top of another.
Early reports indicate some tragic fallacies in the way that states are approaching these requirements, whether in good faith or with malice. CNN reported on a pilot test for example, where…
…the state of Louisiana texted just over 13,000 people enrolled in its Medicaid program with a link to a website where they could confirm their incomes….But only 894 people completed the quarterly wage check, or just under 7% of enrollees who got the text, according to Drew Maranto, undersecretary for the Louisiana Department of Health.
Let’s ignore the obvious, including how many had active cellphones, and just focus on the digital divide, which has already been established in places like Arkansas in the early years of Obamacare where families were forced to maintain certification through the internet, and 18,000 people lost coverage within several months. This all bodes ill. Maranto’s reaction was equally disturbing. His solution was not to understand that this won’t work, but to say they would need to “increase awareness.” Once again, let’s remember that Arkansas, again for example, in trying to exclude eligible people from Obamacare, passed legislation barring any advertising or efforts to increase public awareness of the program. Getting red state legislatures to pay for the public programs to increase enrollment isn’t credible.
Too many state and federal officials seem to be claiming that technology is the answer and that “with today’s artificial intelligence ‘people should be able to seamlessly enter how they are spending their time.’” Untested and unproven artificial intelligence schemes are recipes for disaster. Dr. Oz, the television doctor who lost an earlier race for Senator in Pennsylvania, now runs the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, seems confused about the fact that the federal government doesn’t administer these programs. The states do. People connected to the pilots in Louisiana and Arizona have been unwilling to share details, which is also a bad sign that no one has figured any of this out yet. Furthermore, what is known about the tests indicates that
…neither pilot program could confirm whether a person meets other qualifying activities — such as community service — or any of the numerous exemptions. The tools being tested can verify only income.
Georgetown’s Joan Alker, a health policy researcher, takes us back full circle and hit the nail on the head, saying…
Even with an app that states can use to prove people are eligible for Medicaid, enrollees would still need to know that app existed and how to use it — neither of which is a given. There is also no guarantee they’d have reliable cell service or internet access.
For lower income, working families, all of this spells disaster, but that’s not really the right word, since this impending tragedy is deliberate, and no amount of words can disguise its design to deny entitlement benefits to the eligible in a horrible example of “gotcha.”