[pyuser583]

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.

[cmrdporcupine]

Not-American here: the issue is having to have a program like Medicaid in the first place.

A half-century of struggle in other industrialized western nations happened precisely because of this kind of thing. And in the 50s and 60s and 70s ... because of that -- and because of fear of contagion from the USSR -- most countries put in universal health care systems of various forms which eliminated the need for means testing and "charity" type medical care in the first place and defined quality health care as universal available.

Time for that struggle again.

[nickff]

The US's problem seems to be that citizens demand a very high level of (costly) medical care, which would not be sustainable if implemented as a taxpayer-funded universal program. As an example, the numbers which I've seen indicate that the USA has about 10x as many MRI machines per capita than Canada (which is generally a comparable country). The other big problem is the way that Medicaid is implemented, with funding and accountability divided between the Federal Government (which doesn't have the constitutional authority to run healthcare), and the States (which do); this is rather similar to Canada, which also has major issues caused by this division.