By Rick Cohen
September 30, 2015
Arizona governor Jan Brewer was one of the very few Republican governors in southern or western states to go along with the Affordable Care Act option of expanding income eligibility for Medicaid. Presumably, she realized that spurning the new moneys offered by the federal government and leaving a swath of Arizonans without possibilities of affordable healthcare insurance would be, in the end, costly to the state (providing medical care for the uninsured) and counterproductive.
…
Ollove quotes Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University, who points out the “punitive strain” in the proposals and the “assumption that, left to themselves, people will make bad choices and that we the government will make better choices for them.” It is an interesting anomaly to find conservatives in government who generally believe in choice denying that choice to people who happen to be low-income or minority, based on the idea that the poverty of poor people is due to their own bad decisions or their inability to make good ones.
Read more here.
