How Medicaid Cuts Come for Us All

No one is immune to the boomerang effect of being around more sick people

Imagine walking into a McDonald’s with two service lines.

Above one cashier reads a sign: “This employee has healthcare coverage.”

Above the other cashier reads a different sign: “This employee does not have healthcare coverage.”

Which line are you getting in?

Our collective public health is the one thing that binds us all together. Whether we like it or not. Regardless of economic status, race, creed or religion. Even across the vast political divide.

Anyone who thinks that someone else’s healthiness is someone else’s problem might want to consider this: It’s your problem too — and that of your family, friends and associates — should any of you come into contact with any of them if they’re unwell.

And those who lack preventive care — or who can’t afford treatment when they become ill — are far more likely to carry infectious germs, from the common cold to brain-eating amoebas (so as not to leave the nation’s leading health official out of this).

Consider it the Boomerang Doctrine. Whatever negatively impacts the health of one group comes flying back on all other groups. With no exemptions or opt-outs.

You might enjoy the most platinum, premier, crème de la crème healthcare coverage money can buy, but if you or yours encounter the wrong restaurant server, childcare provider, retail clerk or delivery person, you get whatever they have. Medically speaking, of course.

For my readers of more substantial means, think butler, chauffeur, concierge or country club attendant. (And see my Founder’s level here.)

But here’s the reality: No white-glove medical attention can compensate for someone else’s black hole where healthcare should have been.

It’s long troubled me that my side of the healthcare debate has refrained from framing the case through the prism of self-interest. I suppose it’s the nature of discord today that we default to our differences rather than seek common cause.

Self-interest is hardly the most noble motivation. In a better world, care and compassion for the less fortunate would be enough—so too would the principle that healthcare and insurance coverage should rank among the most fundamental rights of a civilized society.

But we don’t live in one of those at the moment. Instead, we’ve become ever more angry and tribal and inconsiderate. “Blessed is he that considereth the poor” worked fine as a psalm, but wouldn’t pass as a referendum in lots of states.

Yes, it is a searing moral indictment of our times that our federal government just enacted one of the most heartless measures imaginable to rip basic health coverage from as many as 12 million Americans who need it most.

But the larger that number grows, the more Americans find themselves numbed by the numbers. I’d rather focus on the opposite — on the far more minuscule total that one can count in their own family.

The underlying rationale for Medicaid “work requirements” — truly a fig leaf — is that vast numbers of Medicaid recipients somehow are too lazy to work or otherwise delight themselves in gaming the system. As that smear goes, the poor enjoy lives of leisure at the expense of hardworking Americans like you and me.

It’s a lie rooted in the racist — and utterly discredited — tropes that animated resistance to social change dating back to the Great Society of the 1960s. And now, arguably, even to FDR’s New Deal.

But if the argument is litigated on that ground, it’s just another in the interminable litany of issues and grievances that tear us apart. So I say everyone dismount their high horses and lay down their political arms.

Just come together to ask one question:

Which line are you getting in?

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