I'd be plenty worried about what they mean by "helping people to help themselves." I'm guessing if you're a member of the working poor and you "help yourself" by giving up every single thing that makes your life livable, the freedom loving wingnuts might grant you a measly voucher to buy some vitamins. But they'll own you -- drug tests will probably be the least of it.
These are many people, remember,
who think like this:
I don't believe people are going to bed hungry. Do you know how much, do you ever go shopping? I go sometimes but I hate it. Do you ever go? ... you can get, for instance I have friends of mine who eat rice and beans all the time. Beans protein, rice. Inexpensive. You can make a big pot of this for a week for negligible amounts of money and you can feed your whole family.
Look, you should have vegetables and fruit in there as well, but if you need to survive you can survive off it. It's not ideal but you could get some cheap meat and throw in there as well for protein. There are ways to live really, really cheaply.
That was multi-millionaire celebrity Sean Hannity. (And let's not forget
the perennial "they have refrigerators and TVs! They don't deserve any help until they are living in a cardboard box --- and even then...")
The problem with Medicaid is that it's going to poor people and Republicans just don't have any sympathy for them. Sure, it makes no sense to have your own government spend more money on emergency room care than on a health care plan the feds will completely pay for, but many of these people genuinely think it's a moral hazard to allow the working poor to have any help because it makes them dependent and lazy. Just look at
the hideous stuff they say about the unemployed even in an economy with nearly 10% unemployment.
It's not just that a lot of our fellow Americans have no empathy, although they don't. It's that many of them are actively hostile to people they believe are taking their tax dollars and refusing to "earn" the benefits they themselves believe they have earned. These are often people who are on the dole in one way or another themselves. It's a conceit of white privilege and it hasn't gone away yet.
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