Get a better job? Why didn’t I think of that?

In 1974, I was the Regional Editor of the third largest newspaper in West Virginia. I had a responsible job, supervised a staff of eight or 10 paid correspondents, worked long hours and traveled around nine counties in the state in my own car (and on my own dime, as I recall).

I was not, in other words, a lazy slacker.

For my efforts, if memory serves, I was paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $8,000 a year with zero health insurance benefits. I had a wife who didn’t work and a two-year-old daughter and, in September of that year, my younger daughter was born. My employer – out of the goodness of its heart – provided us with a maternity benefit to help defray several hundred dollars in hospital costs.

They gave us $35.

It was so insulting I almost gave it back.

I believe we qualified for food stamps back then, as well as free government cheese, but never applied for those programs out of a distorted sense of pride. The Regional Editor of the third largest newspaper in the state did not accept food stamps or blocks of condensed Velveeta. We also did not enroll in Medicaid.

If we had, I would have been the kind of “able-bodied worker” that Kellyanne Conway thinks should be excluded from the Medicaid program. On Sunday, while discussing the Senate's proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act, Conway said people who will lose Medicaid coverage under the Republican health care plan should just go find jobs that provide health insurance.

Gee, I wish I had thought of that back in 1974. I never would have accepted a job with the lowly Parkersburg Sentinel when I could have demanded to be hired as Editor-in-Chief of The New York Times...or advisor to the president.   

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m not sure I qualified for Medicaid in 1974. I called the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources but they don’t seem to know what the income limit was back then. When I asked the question, I was told, “Good luck with that.” I had to email the question to them and I’m still waiting for a response.

It doesn’t matter, though. The point is that millions of Americans are receiving Medicaid benefits while working at jobs that do not provide health insurance coverage. Many of them work very hard at the only thing they are qualified for – or the only job they could get – and do not deserve to be labeled as slackers by a public relations hack who reportedly is paid $176,000 a year to lie to the media and make up “alternative facts.”     

According to Conway, Medicaid was never designed for “healthy people who could work.” Those people, she said, should take better jobs where “they'll have employer-sponsored benefits like you and I do.”  The absurdity of that statement makes it almost impossible for a response, but here’s one anyway:

Jonathan Cohn points out in the Huffington Post that nearly eight in 10 Medicaid recipients live in working families and a majority are working themselves. Fifty-nine percent of them work either part- or full-time. The problem is that they work as parking attendants and child care workers, manicurists and dishwashers – in other words, low-paying jobs that typically don't offer insurance. Take away their Medicaid and they won't be covered at all.

First off, don’t we need people to do the jobs they do? If not for them, who would park the cars and wash the dishes and babysit our children? Who else is going to do that? You, Kellyanne?

And second, I would argue that even the “healthy, able-bodied” adults to whom she refers sometimes get sick and require medical care that the Emergency Room doesn’t provide, or maybe their wives have babies, or they want contraception so they don’t have babies, or they contract catastrophic illnesses and face death, or any of a number of other reasons why they need Medicaid to survive.

But not to worry. When Donald Trump, his children and his 400 closest billionaire friends get their massive tax break, I'm sure they'll create millions of new jobs with full benefits for all of the people who got kicked out of Medicaid. Either that, or they'll buy more summer houses, private jets and yachts. 

One or the other.