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A comment on /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification. Parent comment

Re:/r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrifi... by nybble41 on Monday February 07, 2022 @06:59PM (#30253287)
Average Medicaid expenditures (per year) for persons with disabilities (age 0-64) was $19.7k in 2016[0]. It's probably higher by now. So by cutting Medicaid and replacing it with a flat $15k/year you're reducing benefits to persons with disabilities, on average, by almost $5k/year. Since that's an average, I'm sure there are some who will see much larger cuts and quite a few who will find themselves unable to afford necessary treatments or other costs relating to their disability.

That's just Medicaid; it gets worse when you consider all the other programs being cut.

Even allowing for realistic reductions in bureaucratic overhead, you can't just cut narrowly targeted programs and spread the same amount of money evenly across the entire population without significantly reducing the money available, on average, to the original beneficiaries.

[0] https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/medicaid-facts-and-...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:/r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrifi... by relaxing on Monday February 07, 2022 @08:58PM (#30254075)
UBI doesn’t mean every expenditure suddenly becomes out of pocket.

The sensible move would be to keep disability, etc. as a form of insurance where costs are spread across the populace.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:/r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrifi... by nybble41 on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @12:32AM (#30255235)
> The sensible move would be to keep disability, etc. as a form of insurance where costs are spread across the populace.

And now you're back where you started—you haven't eliminated these need-based programs at all, or reduced the bureaucracy. You've just added the UBI as an extra expense.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:/r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrifi... by relaxing on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @06:30AM (#30257226)
It’s not at all or nothing proposition. Your employer probably pays you a salary and offers you disability insurance too.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:/r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrifi... by giantg2 on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @07:26AM (#30257618)
That's literally what the proposition in the link is - remove these existing programs and tax deductions to pay for the UBI.
[ Parent | on HN ]