A minefield for low income Arkansans
This is about grave threats to our brothers and sisters who did not have the opportunity to get a good education or access to preventive health care. In Arkansas, around 280,000 men and women are sick, unemployed, and in poverty. Being poor is very expensive. At some point in our lives, we have been in difficult situations. Without a helping hand, poverty is a deadly spiral.
Healthcare for the poor
Back in 2014, the use of federal funds to purchase private health insurance for poor Arkansans was known as the Private Option. The name was later changed to Medicaid Expansion. Life was good. Then, last month, Gov. Hutchinson changed the name to Arkansas Works with new eligibility requirements.
Arkansas Works 2.0 is the latest version with additional requirements, including having an email account and the use of a Department of Human Services portal to report 80 hours of work per month. Arkansas Works 2.0 is intended to punish poor people for being uneducated and broke. The work requirements, online reporting, email communication, reduced retroactive coverage, and lockout provisions reveal a cruel worldview. What is described as “able-bodied workers” suggests that minorities, Native Americans, and “people of color” are lazy no good individuals, a financial liability for the Arkansas economy.
Arkansas Works 2.0 is like a maze with spring-loaded mousetraps on the floor, where able-bodied barefoot and blind-folded contestants have to run every month. Losers are kicked out of the program and have to wait until the next calendar year to reapply. For details please contact the Arkansas Advocates for Families and Children.
Phantom Jobs
Arkansas reports a distorted picture of jobs and unemployment. If you are working two jobs to pay your bills, or if you have a low-wage job because you could not find anything better, you know life is not all milk and honey.
Get a couple of eggs and cook a sunny side up egg. Make sure the yolk is runny and the whites are set. This is not as easy as it sounds, try again.
The yolk and the runny area around it represent the labor force, the people with full-time jobs. The runny border represents the unemployed, about four percent, according to Arkansas. People working part-time who would rather have a permanent job and many other people who have given up looking for a job are represented by the egg white area. The true unemployment rate in Arkansas is 30-40 percent. Economists have egg on their face when they report low unemployment rates.
Chicken and egg problems
High schools have grants from the Arkansas Department of Career Education to train welders, A/C techs, and other job skills but there are few welding and A/C job openings in the area. On the other hand, there are good
technical jobs available in Arkansas, but few applicants have the required qualifications.
Severe weather events in 2018 will be worse than what we saw last year. Arkansas is not prepared to deal with floods, droughts or any other disaster. Training and staffing quick response emergency teams, similar to firehouses covering a wider area, would be a wise investment.
“Silo accounting” keeps state Medicaid funds separate from payments for uninsured medical treatments made to hospitals and emergency clinics, and separate from high school grants. These funds have conflicting goals.
A new economic study shows immigrants create jobs: “If 1,000 new immigrants were to move in, the local economy would end up gaining about 1,200 new jobs. The researchers refer to this increased demand effect as a ‘shot-in-the-arm’ for the local economy, as demand for everyday goods and services grow with the expanding population.”
Compassionate healthcare for the poor
“Be thankful and pray for one another. Blessed Mother Earth,” powerful words of Indigenous wisdom reveal a compassionate way of living. This is also brilliant practical advice. For those who use dollars to measure progress, the cost of providing preventive healthcare is a small fraction of the cost of emergency care. It pays to be kind.
After giving billionaires a massive tax cut, Trump has declared war on low-income Americans and the homeless. Arkansas US Senators Tom Cotton and John Boozman tried to kill the Medicaid Expansion.
“Health Care for America Now, Arkansas Community Organizations and other organizations are sponsoring a Day of Action to defend Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act this coming Wednesday, June 21 at Noon in front of the Victory Building at 1401 W. Capitol in Little Rock. The rally will feature speakers from the communities impacted by cuts to Medicaid and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Participants of the rally will turn in hundreds of postcards to Senators Cotton and Boozman urging them to oppose legislation that ends the Medicaid expansion, cuts and restructures Medicaid and takes away health coverage from millions of people.”
https://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2017/06/20/sen-tom-cotton-dont-ask-him-about-health-care
What about the homeless?
Yes, there are homeless people in Arkansas, and they also have to meet work requirements and have an email address.
GOP has discovered a new sub-human species, “Able-Bodied Adult Without Dependents” (ABAWD), described as lazy, no-good, undeserving of healthcare.
GOP psychopaths choose cruelty over compassion, with Arkansas leading the Nation as the first state to force work requirements, just to get on Trump’s favorite state status.
Homeless and many other “invisible” people, our brothers and sisters, will end up in Emergency Rooms dying from chronic diseases.
Arkansas Works 3.0 will solve the high cost of Emergency Room care by hiring security to take ABAWD to the new Private GEO Arkansas Detention Centers
Arkansas Works 4.0 will solve the cost of incarceration, providing a cardboard box and a shovel.
Hey, this is the Natural State!
“Arkansas Works” and “Arkansas Works 2.0” are not the same
Gov Hutchinson added the work requirements to Arkansas Works (no longer available)
This intended confusion is intentional
Several Democrat candidates were in support of Arkansas Works, and have not updated the information
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America Works is the House of Cards program to provide jobs for everyone. If you have seen the show, you know the story. Someone may be playing a trick on our Republican Governor.
DHS came up with a solution for people without computers: hire an Insurance Agent !
Incredible
May 4, 2018
“Arkansas Works enrollees who lack access to computers or have difficulty reading will be able to enlist someone else, such as a relative or insurance agent, to help them comply with a work requirement that takes effect next month, the state Department of Human Services announced Thursday.”
The helpers, known as registered reporters, must each complete a short online course on using a state website to report whether the enrollee met a requirement to spend at least 80 hours a month working or on other approved activities or qualified for an exemption.
Both the enrollee and helper must sign forms authorizing the helper to use the website on the enrollee’s behalf
Americans should not have to suffer from hunger and poor health
Senator Boozman promised plenty of local jobs giving the top 1 percent a massive tax cut. Please call his office and ask for the new jobs
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/news/2018/05/01/450214/tax-cuts-top-1-percent-cost-snap/
Do you know what SNAP or ABAWD are?
Here is a report on the new work requirements for food stamps (SNAP).
Proving disability is a nightmare. You many need a law degree to understand the rules
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Under the current SNAP eligibility rules, an “Able-Bodied Adult Without Dependents” (ABAWD) between the ages of 18 and 49 can only receive 3 months of SNAP benefits in any 3-year period if they do not meet the existing SNAP work requirements. Yes, there are already work requirements for SNAP, but Congressional Republicans are pushing for still more draconian rules.
They assure us that just as disabled folks are supposed to be exempt under the current rules—an exemption that has proven elusive—they will be exempt under the new regulations, too.
However, proving disability to the government is exceedingly difficult. First, it virtually requires ongoing, meaningful, affordable access to comprehensive medical care.
Without medical records, government agencies are loathe to find an applicant disabled. (Yet, conservatives are also working to roll back access to health care at every turn, including by imposing work requirements on Medicaid, making care even more of a challenge to obtain.)
Proving disability also often requires the cooperation of overworked health care providers in completing legal forms they’re not trained to deal with. Doctors are taught to diagnose and treat, not judge someone’s capacity to work against specific, highly technical legal criteria.
And it means a lot of work for the applicant—work they may be too sick to do.
https://talkpoverty.org/2018/05/02/shouldnt-need-law-degree-get-food-assistance/
Community Engagement = Work requirement, is one of the many new names no one knows
Here is a reliable source of information:
The community engagement requirement was approved and can be implemented anytime on or after June 1, 2018.
Medicaid enrollees who aren’t exempt from the requirement will have to complete at least 80 hours per month of work, volunteering, community service, education, or job training, and report this information to the state each month.
People who fail to report their community engagement for three months will be disenrolled from Medicaid for the rest of the calendar year (ie, for up to nine months, which is a significant lock-out window).
The community engagement requirement will apply to enrollees age 19 through 49; children and people age 50 and older are not subject to the work requirement.
There are also exemptions for pregnant women, children, a caretaker of someone who is either incapacitated or a minor child, people in alcohol or drug treatment programs, people who are disabled or otherwise physically unable to work, people receiving unemployment benefits or Transitional Employment Assistance cash assistance, as well as a “good cause exemption” for people who can demonstrate that they had a justifiable reason for not completing their 80 hours of community engagement in a month.
Source: https://www.healthinsurance.org/arkansas-medicaid/
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Medicare is not the only program at risk for the poor. Food Stamps may be next:
Under the proposed Farm Bill, the work requirement age range would be expanded to 59, and there would be fewer exemptions. Individuals without a disability and parents with children above the age of six would be asked to work at least twenty hours a week by fiscal year 2021 in order to keep their benefits. The minimum work week would rise to 25 hours by 2025.
Work requirement opponents said there are few low-wage jobs that offer a steady and predictable twenty hours a week. Retail and fast food positions are especially known for schedules that can vary widely from week to week.
“If your manager cuts your hours one month that means you’re not only receiving a smaller paycheck that month but you also have potentially become ineligible for SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] assistance, on top of that,” said Eleanor Wheeler with the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families.
http://ualrpublicradio.org/post/food-stamp-work-requirements-proposed-could-push-needy-rural-food-pantries