Your Government Dollars At Work
This is a government employee defending the decision to require people to prove citizenship to get Medicaid benefits:
“As far as we can see through reviews with the states, the
documentation requirement has had no impact,” said Dennis Smith,
director of the Center for Medicaid and State Operations.
Right. Well, at least it didn’t cost anything, right? I mean, you just have to look at a birth certificate or something.
Forty-five states said the requirements increased administrative costs
because they had to train workers and set up computer systems to check
the validity of the records that beneficiaries presented…”It was a tremendous administrative burden on us, and it was certainly a burden on consumers,” Allison said.
Train workers? Set up computer systems? It’s clear that the government, in contrast to the private sector, actually looks for ways to waste money.
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October 11, 2007 7:29 am
By cartographer, October 28, 2007 @ 5:25 am
Do you really think it’s as easy as looking at a birth certificate? Quick: what’s the citizenship of a person born in London in 1975 to an American father and a British mother? (Up to a few months ago the result would have been different for the child of a British father and an American mother.) What if mother and father were not married to each other at the time of birth? How if they married subsequently? What if the child came to the United States as a minor?
Don’t know off the top of your head? Can’t begin to say what kinds of documents will be needed to substantiate the facts? Well, neither can an untrained bureaucrat. Citizenship is complicated — because our laws have made it so.
By m, October 29, 2007 @ 7:28 pm
I think the purpose of documentation is to make it so that an “untrained bureaucrat” doesn’t have to make those decisions. They either have the necessary documents or they don’t.
But, that’s beside the point. The point is that the government imposed “a tremendous administrative burden” on a program that has produced no benefit.
However, I guess results would indicate that’s the government’s modus operandi.