Public health care shouldn’t be a business, but that idea didn’t bother Mike Johnson…

Medicaid is an American health insurance program for low-income people. States and the federal government fund it, and like most government programs that help people in some way, it’s a target of the Trump administration, so they want to cut it too. Part of the plan is to implement work requirements for Medicaid eligibility, but that is currently only an active rule in the American state of Georgia. To justify why they are putting this administrative burden on the backs of patients and states, Republicans claim that access to taxpayer-funded health care is causing young men to waste all their time playing video games instead of working.

“Nobody has talked about cutting a benefit in Medicaid to anybody who’s rightfully owed it – what we’ve talked about is reinstating work requirements, so you don’t have, for example, able-bodied young men on a program that’s designed for single mothers and the elderly and the disabled. You’re taking resources away from people. So if you clean that up and shore it up, you save a lot of money and you restore the dignity of work to young men who need to be working instead of playing video games all day,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said last week.

Some context is needed for this comment, as a health researcher, KFF, reported in February that the majority of Medicaid recipients are working. According to the analysis, 64% of Medicaid recipients under the age of 65 work full or part time, and the majority of those who do not work have an illness or disability, are working as caregivers, or are in school.

America is in a bit of an odd situation when it comes to health care. Dozens of countries around the world have some level of universal health care. China, Canada, Mexico, Cuba have it, as do Russia and several European countries…

Source: PCGamer, KFF