Ok see what they’re doing - they’re taking a position that sounds (and mostly is) horrible. But they putting a poison pill for their opponents to consume: HIV patients have to work.
Thats common sense. People with HIV are usually able to work, and usually not terminally ill in the typical sense.
There are already comments defending the silly idea of HIV patients being excluded from work expectations: “if that’s the cost of a social safety net …”
That’s not the cost of a social safety net anywhere else in the world.
The current administration isn’t stupid. They know how get their opponents to freak out and say stupid things, and every stupid thing they say outweighs 100 reasonable things.
Be careful: work requirements are a mine field of helpfulness, good governance, and cruelty.
This is incredibly cruel, and not surprising at all.
On par with this administration- Goons pulled back because they're murdering innocent civilians at car stops? Chief goon steps up and says "put them back!"
Then he takes to the waves to instill fear and uncertainty in our election process.
Americans are being boiled alive, nice and slow- and a third of them love it!
I have what is ostensibly an incurable terminal cancer and i work, by my own choice, 40+ per week. I see no issue with making folks in similar positions show that they are in fact, too sick to work.
If an individual IS too sick to work it should be relatively simple to get the required documents to prove that fact. God know i had enough hospital social workers and doctors asking me if it wanted said documentation.
Maybe certain Kentucky Senators shouldn't be exempt from work requirements, then.
People have always suffered under the banality of indifferent evils. A blanket policy is bad policy and that dovetails into Trump's laziness/stupidity.
Putting that aside, is the estimated terminal deadline a good measure for subsidy qualification...ie I'm dead in 5 years from my conditions, so when should I be exempt from the work requirement?
The original title is:
> Trump Admin Argues Even Terminally Ill Patients Shouldn’t Be Exempt From Medicaid Work Requirements
The Cruelty Is the Point.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelt...
Evil. Just evil. Terminally ill patients can't work, they're on deaths door. If they don't get treatment, they are dead. Let's let the medical decisions be handled by doctors and not some politician.
Honestly things like this show me the President has to much power. There should be government agencies where no political party can touch it without significant oversight and approval from both the president and both houses of congress.
Medicare, Medicaid, FBI, FCC, FAA, The Fed, and more all should be outside admin control of the president and any single party or group of individuals. Only when you have a 2/3s majority of both the houses and the president should you be able to make such broad sweeping policy changes.