On Thursday’s broadcast of 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,” having these work requirements “forces” people to work and would help small businesses “that need to exploit people” and that “The people who receive Medicaid are people who already work.”
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 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.”