A look behind the curtain (Via Michael Cannon):
Too many conservative advocates of Medicaid reform couch their advocacy in terms such as “enrolling in private health plans will remove the stigma from patients on Medicaid” and “choice is better than cutting Medicaid reimbursements to providers, which limit recipients' access to the best doctors.” These may be effects of a reform, but they shouldn't be thought of as goals or even as necessarily positive.
Repeat after me: Medicaid is welfare. Medicaid is welfare. Medicaid is welfare. It is a forced redistribution of resources from those who earned them to those who did not. There may be good reasons to defend Medicaid as a concept, or to imagine some kind of more-limited program to replace it, but they must recognize that Medicaid is an arm of the welfare state. As such, no one should consider it a “right” for Medicaid recipients to have access to the very same doctors, devices, and treatments as those who pay their own way.
He's right -- conservatives should stop bullshitting about Medicaid and just honestly represent their opposition to it. Remember, though, that if we stop providing Medicaid, we're all going to be paying for its former enrollees when they show up at the hospital. And if we stop letting them show up at the hospital, we'll all be inconvenienced when stepping over their bodies in the street, or catching their bacterial infections on the bus. But none of that changes the fact that Medicaid is, indeed, a form of welfare, and conservatives should come right out and demand its elimination.
