The GOP is quietly crafting work requirement waivers -- for white people
By Christine Emba Columnist May 16 at 8:10 PM WP
In January, the Trump administration released new guidelines that would allow states to begin imposing work requirements on Medicaid recipients. It was a kindness, really: According to Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, meaningful work is essential to “economic self-sufficiency, self-esteem, well being and .?.?. health.”
Well, for some of us.
Since the announcement, states have raced to implement new work requirements, which will have the effect of bumping hundreds of thousands of their poorest citizens off the Medicaid rolls. But in more recent months, a number of GOP-controlled states have been quietly crafting waivers that would end up shielding rural, white residents from this new scheme for self-esteem.
In Ohio, Michigan and Kentucky, work-requirement waivers would include exemptions for counties with the highest levels of unemployment, which are overwhelmingly white, rural — and GOP-leaning. But most of these exemptions would do nothing to help people of color who live in high-unemployment urban areas, because they live in places where countywide unemployment numbers are skewed by the inclusion of wealthy suburbs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gop-is-quietly-crafting-work-requirement-waivers--for-white-people/2018/05/16/fcef4eb8-5928-11e8-8836-a4a123c359ab_story.html?utm_term=.7fe28d261eb3
