Moore: House GOP Debt Ceiling Bill Will Exploit People

Thursday on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) acknowledged that the stricter Medicaid work requirements in the House Republican debt ceiling bill “would save a lot of money,” but having these work requirements “forces” people to work and would help small businesses “that need to exploit people.”

Moore said, “These work requirements are really just designed to take benefits away from the neediest people. I’ll give you an example: About $11 billion over the decade would be saved by not providing Medicaid to people with one provision, providing that people who are 50 years old — instead of 50 years old, they would raise the age to 55, so that if you were an ‘able-bodied’ 55-year-old, you’d have to work in order to receive Medicaid. And that would save a lot of money, because there are a lot of people who are 55 who are not [‘able-bodied.’] They conflate welfare recipients, women who have children, maybe multiple children, barriers with so-called able-bodied people that they want to take benefits away from.”

She continued, “The people who receive Medicaid are people who already work. Right now in the state of Wisconsin, if you worked every single weekday at $7.50 an hour, say you’ve got a job working at a fast food restaurant — and probably couldn’t get full-time work, these poor small businesses that Mr. Scalise was talking about — if you got yourself two of these jobs, worked $7.50 an hour, 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, you’d make $15,080 a year and that’d be just enough money to disqualify you from Medicaid. And so, there’s a lot of nonsense in this.”

She concluded, “This, with regard to supporting small businesses, small businesses that have a business model, that need to exploit people, pay them subpar wages, rely on part-time workers, seasonal workers, immigrants, these people who can be exploited, these are the kinds of small businesses that Rep. Steve Scalise [R-LA] is talking about that he wants to support with a government-sponsored program that targets these workers, forces them to work and never be able to lift themselves out of poverty through this work.”

Pure Democrat projection. It’s not the Republicans, but the Big-Government Democrats, who want and need voters to be hooked on endless government assistance.