End Work Requirements For All Health Care. Not Just Medicaid.

It’s 2018 and Americans have all agreed that when you turn 65 it’s politically acceptable for the government to support you. Before that? Tough luck.

Until a certain advanced age, the recognition and protection of an individual’s life is secondary to the necessity of the nine-to-five life.

But turn 65 and the attainment of basic necessities, like health care, are suddenly severed from work, and the individual comes to possesses a right simply because they exist.

It’s peculiar, too, that the general public agrees with this outdated worldview. A recent poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that “70 percent of Americans favored allowing states to impose work requirements on non-disabled adults receiving Medicaid.”

Republicans have seen numbers like these and deemed work requirements to be an uncontroversial political move. Across the country—from Minnesota to Arkansas—they’re forcing Medicaid recipients to seek work.

Democrats are responding as you’d expect—with moral and political outrage. Earlier this year, 172 House Democrats signed a letter in opposition to the Medicaid gutting, claiming:

Actions to tie health coverage to work are motivated purely on the basis of ideology and mistaken assumptions about what Medicaid is and who it covers.

This is not enough, though. Their collective horror at work requirements for poor and disabled individuals’ health care must be expanded to all individuals. Otherwise, their cries of injustice appear insincere. A work requirement for any sort of health care is unacceptable.

It’s heartening to see left-leaning think tanks like Center for American Progress toying with this idea so soon after Hillary Clinton’s technocratic healthcare plan fell flat. CAP’s “Medicare Extra for All” plan is not perfect, by any means. But it does create a program that “would be available to all Americans regardless of income and employment status.”

That bold vision is exactly the type of policy choice which will propel Democrats back into power. America currently has an unhealthy “obsession with work ethic over everything else — including people’s well-being.” If we’re going to represent the interests of all, and not the few, progressives could do far worse than severing the link between health care and work.