Republicans are devoted to inflicting pain on the poor

Democrats want to strengthen the social safety net; Republicans want to weaken it. But why?

GOP opposition to programs helping the less fortunate, from food stamps to Medicaid, is usually framed in monetary terms. For example, Sen. Orrin Hatch, challenged about Congress’s failure to take action on the Children’s Health Insurance Program, a part of Medicaid that covers nearly 9 million children — and whose federal funding expired in September — declared that “the reason CHIP’s having trouble is that we don’t have money anymore.”

But is it really about the money? No, it’s about the cruelty. Over the past few years it has become increasingly clear that the suffering imposed by Republican opposition to safety-net programs isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Inflicting pain is the point.

To see what I mean, consider three stories about health care policies.

First, there’s the saga of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable

Care Act. The Supreme Court allowed states to opt out of this expansion. But accepting expansion should have been a no-brainer for every state: The federal government would initially pay the full cost, and in the long run it would pay 90 percent.

Yet 18 states — all of them with Republican-controlled legislatures, governors or both — still haven’t expanded Medicaid. Why?

For a while you could argue that it was about cynical political strategy: Medicaid expansion was a policy of Barack Obama, and Republicans didn’t want to give a Democratic president any policy successes. But at this point it’s clear that GOP politicians simply don’t want lower-income families to have access to health care and are actually willing to hurt their own states’ economies to deny them that access.

Second, there’s the issue of work requirements for Medicaid. Some states have been petitioning for years for the right to force Medicaid recipients to take jobs, and last week the Trump administration declared that it would allow them to do so. But what was driving this demand?

The reality is that a vast majority of adult Medicaid recipients are in families where at least one adult is working. And a vast majority of those who aren’t working have very good reasons for not being in the labor force: They’re disabled, they’re caregivers to other family members or they’re students.

Oh, and of the 10 states reportedly seeking to impose work requirements, six have accepted the ACA Medicaid expansion, which means that most of the money they could save by kicking people off would be federal, not state, dollars.

It isn’t about saving money, it’s about stigmatizing those who receive government aid. Again, the pain is the point.

Finally, there’s the case of children’s health insurance. So what will it cost the Treasury if Congress restores funding? The answer, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is — nothing. Or actually less than nothing. In fact, a 10-year extension of CHIP funding would save the government $6 billion.

So Republican foot-dragging on CHIP isn’t about the money, it’s about the cruelty. Making lower-income Americans worse off has become a goal in itself for the modern GOP, a goal the party is actually willing to spend money and increase deficits to achieve.