The Big Beautiful Bill and the "Undeserving Poor"
A quick redux
Amid the rush to pass Trumps’ so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says will add $2.4 million to the deficit and kick 10.8 million people off Medicaid and ACA plans while extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, I have been thinking about how we have been here many times before. Just two years ago, I wrote a little essay here on the fight over the debt ceiling and the passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, which expanded work requirements for federal social welfare programs.
I’m sharing that post again today because everything I said there is still true and applies to the plan in the Big Beautiful Bill to expand Medicaid work requirements:
The Debt Ceiling and The "Deserving" Poor
In writing and researching my book American Orphan, I have realized that within the history of orphanhood in America lie many other histories—the histories of childhood, motherhood, and the family; the history of immigration and religion; the history of slavery and civil rights; the history of Native sovereignty. The most consistent overlap and throughl…
I also wanted to share this recent op-ed from the New York Times, written by two lawyers who successfully sued the state of Arkansas to stop work requirements for Medicaid, which unleashed bureaucratic chaos during the few months they were in place in 2018. As the lawyers point out, the work requirements were costly and did not increase employment; in fact, in some cases, they made it harder for people to get or keep jobs, because they lacked needed care to be healthy enough to work. Further, 92 percent of targeted Medicaid recipients already work.
Since I researched The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow, I have been consistently gobsmacked by how intransigent Americans are when it comes to the myth of the “undeserving” poor. Everyday people truly want to believe that those with less money and advantages than them are in that situation because of their own choices and behaviors, not because of the systems that govern American life. I see this in the frankly bonkers comments and emails I got in response to my review of Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us and Sarah Jones’s Disposable for The Washington Post. I see this in the bad faith review of my own book by an American Enterprise Institute fellow (which I will not be linking to, obviously).
In order to challenge this myth, we must call it out. People’s lives are on the line. Call your senators and tell them to vote against this bill.