Dear Friends,                                                                                     Healthcare (1)

Healthcare is to make people healthy, that’s all. It’s not for policing people’s lives in other areas unconnected to health. This is all you need to know that demands for Medicaid work requirements are wrong.

There are other things, of course: work requirements make people needing healthcare worse off; they force eligible people off Medicaid. Work requirements only work to deprive people of necessary healthcare; and there is no evidence to suggest that access to healthcare leads people to shirk work.

All these are important, they show very clearly that the demand for work requirements is intentionally punitive and nothing else, and that it follows from the claim that those who need Medicaid don’t deserve healthcare.

But the first thing is that healthcare is for health, everyone’s health.

Adequate and affordable healthcare for all is an obvious, automatic principle for modern democratic societies. It is recognized and established in all advanced capitalist countries but one, just one. This is American Exceptionalism.

Love and solidarity,

            Bobby