How One Company Is Making Millions Off Trump's War on the Poor
President Trump plans to make the poor work for Medicaid and food stamps. That’s extremely punitive for them—but highly lucrative for companies like Maximus.
TRACIE MCMILLAN
One night last March, Sue Fredericks ran into trouble. She had been watching snow accumulate for hours from her post at a 24-hour gas station. Busy stretches on her overnight shift were rare, on account of the size of the town in which she worked; with a few thousand residents an hour from Indianapolis, it is small and quaint, surrounded by corn and soy fields and featuring a shuttered Walmart. March marked Sue’s eighth month on the job, and she was earning $8 an hour. Around 4 a.m., Sue (who asked that I change her name) consolidated the trash into two bags, propped the door open, and, hands full, walked outside. Somewhere near the dumpster, her foot hit a patch of ice. Sue’s leg flew out from under her, and she landed on her right ankle. “I heard it snap and all,” she said later, but “I didn’t break it to where my bone was sticking out.”
Sue, who at 41 already had arthritis from a lifetime of mostly manual labor jobs, crawled inside, called a co-worker, and asked her to come in. The co-worker arrived at 5 a.m., and Sue, who had kept her sturdy boots on in hopes of holding her bones in place, drove to the house she shares with her friend Robin and Robin’s family on the outskirts of town. She took off her boots, propped herself up on her bed, and waited in the dark. When Robin got up an hour later, Sue asked for her opinion on the ankle; Robin (not her real name) took one look and insisted on going to the emergency room.
A couple of years earlier, Sue had gotten health insurance through the Healthy Indiana Plan, a Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. HIP represented a political bargain between then-Gov. Mike Pence, who was hostile to public aid, and advocates who worried about the state’s 596,000 uninsured citizens. The program expanded access but required each participant to make a monthly payment—a feature proponents say gives people “skin in the game.” HIP’s architect, a controversial consultant named Seema Verma, went on to advise a half-dozen states about similar programs. In 2016, then President-elect Donald Trump nominated Verma to head the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the vastly powerful agency that oversees both those programs and their insurance markets. One of her first actions was urging the nation’s governors to impose premiums for Medicaid, charge its low-income recipients extra for emergency room visits, and require recipients to get jobs or job training.
Sue’s experience with HIP offers a preview of how such policies could play out. When HIP first expanded, Sue, single and making about $150 a week after taxes, qualified. She got back on medications for anxiety, depression, arthritis, and emphysema.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/12/how-one-company-is-making-millions-off-trumps-war-on-the-poor/
I think it is time to bring in the heads of Maximus into a congressional hearing....................
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