Health Care
Free Market Friday: The dole spoils the soul
September 23, 2016
Jonathan Small
Should we add more able-bodied adults to the welfare rolls?
Oklahoma lawmakers have wisely rejected the Obamacare Medicaid expansion. Unfortunately, this push to expand medical welfare will return in 2017.
Thousands of kids and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities are already stacked up in a very long line waiting for Medicaid services. Medicaid expansion would push them to the back of the line while creating a new entitlement for up to 628,000 able-bodied adults.
These newly eligible recipients would be men and women in their prime working years. Most have no dependent children. Most have no disabilities keeping them from gainful employment. We should not offer them a welfare benefit that may discourage employment.
“When any man or woman goes on a dole something happens to them mentally, and the quicker they are taken off the dole the better it is for them the rest of their lives,” Franklin D. Roosevelt wisely observed. He understood what the dole – is that word even permissible anymore? – does to a person’s “self-respect, their self-reliance and courage and determination.”