Class war and hatred by the rich of the rest

The Trump plan to hurt the poor.

When Ohio and Michigan expanded their Medicaid programs to broaden coverage, residents who became eligible found it easier to look for work, according to studies by the Ohio Department of Medicaid and the University of Michigan. 

That’s because having Medicaid gave them access to primary care doctors and prescription medicine that helped them live normal lives and get jobs.

That’s how you help people in the real world. 

The Trump administration said Thursday that it would get poor people to work by letting state governments deny them Medicaid if they don’t have a job.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services argues that this draconian step will encourage more Medicaid beneficiaries to get a job and thus “promote better mental, physical and emotional health.”

There’s no evidence that this is true, and the data from Michigan and Ohio shows that it contradicts the truth. 

There is good reason to worry that fewer people will have a job in states that adopt this cruel policy.

. . . .

Republican lawmakers who have demonized the program as welfare for “able-bodied adults” have long sought to require Medicaid beneficiaries to work. 

Those lawmakers have been particularly angry about the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which they have been trying to repeal since it was passed in 2010.

. . . .

Maybe Americans shouldn’t be surprised that this administration wants to take health care away from the poor, given that it has spent so much time trying to wreck the A.C.A. 

But they should be angry.

Republican Sadism.

Democrats want to strengthen the social safety net; Republicans want to weaken it. 

But why?

G.O.P. opposition to programs helping the less fortunate, from food stamps to Medicaid, is usually framed in monetary terms. 

For example, Senator Orrin Hatch, challenged about Congress’s failure to take action on the Children’s Health Insurance Program, a part of Medicaid that covers nearly nine million children — and whose federal funding expired back in September — declared that “the reason CHIP’s having trouble is that we don’t have money anymore.”

And whose fault would that be?

But is it really about the money? 

No, it’s about the cruelty. 

Over the past few years it has become increasingly clear that the suffering imposed by Republican opposition to safety-net programs isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. 

Inflicting pain is the point.

. . . .

So Republican foot-dragging on CHIP, like opposition to Medicaid expansion and the demand for work requirements, isn’t about the money, it’s about the cruelty. 

Making lower-income Americans worse off has become a goal in itself for the modern G.O.P., a goal the party is actually willing to spend money and increase deficits to achieve.

Malevolence and politics

Now consider the crusade of the American billionaires to destroy the great legacy of progressivism, doing all they can to plunge the working class once again into the worst horrors of 19th Century wage slavery.

They are too rich already for this to be about self-interest or their own well-being.

Nor, obviously, can it be about jealousy or envy of the masses.

It could be, but it is not likely, pathological greed.

Might the motive of Koch style, radical Republican politics not be a fierce malevolence, a real and definite desire to greatly and grievously harm the low and the weak, out of sheer hate?