If you are not one of the 353,000 Utahns who receives your health care coverage from Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), then you might think it doesn’t matter to you whether the state or the federal government starts chopping people from the programs.
It matters.
The programs that cover about 10% of the state’s population are targeted for various levels of cuts and being sized up for new rules that would require that recipients have a job.
Both are bad ideas, for reasons that are both moral and economic.
People who don’t have health care coverage still need health care. If they can’t pay for it they either go without, become unable to work or care for their families, or are unable to pay their bill.
That means doctors, clinics, therapists and hospitals with fewer paying patients. That means costs get passed along to the patients who can pay, or their insurance carriers, which raises premiums for everyone.
That means that hospitals and clinics, especially in rural areas, lose money. More than 200 of them have shut down in the past 20 years.
Even people with great insurance can’t get emergency care at a hospital that’s shut. Or an appointment with a therapist or practitioner who has moved away for lack of business.
This realization was the motivation behind the creation of the Massachusetts health care program rolled out in 2006 by that state’s Republican then-governor, a guy named Mitt Romney.
Everybody is going to need health care sometime in their lives, and hospitals can’t survive if they are expected to provide that care for free. So everybody needs to have coverage — coverage they pay for, they get from their employer or, when neither of those are affordable, from a government program.
Blowing against that logic has been the emotional resentment, puffed up by Donald Trump and too many of today’s Republicans, that somebody may be getting something for nothing.
They also worry loudly about Medicaid “waste, fraud and abuse,” though the cause of that is mostly a few unscrupulous providers, not households in need.
So Republicans in Congress are looking to slash Medicaid spending, passing the costs along to the states or just taking coverage away from millions. And using the money to give tax cuts to the rich.
And Republicans in Utah are looking to impose work requirements for those on Medicaid going forward.
Both moves would hurt our entire health care system, our whole economy, with an impact felt far beyond today’s cohort of Medicaid recipients.
Besides, in any nation pretending to have a civilized status, you don’t require work to get health care. You provide health care to get workers.
Editorials represent the opinions of The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board, which operates independently from the newsroom.
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