The motion prevailed.
Senator Albert’s statement, in which Senators Victory and Theis concurred, is as follows:
Our state expanded Medicaid roughly a decade ago through the Healthy Michigan plan. This expansion was done with bipartisan support because it included some common-sense guardrails for the program. Measures were put in place to help ensure the program’s stability, including provisions that require participants to share costs and mechanisms that would allow the state to end the program if the cost eventually outweighed the savings. This helped reduce uncompensated care and also incentivized personal responsibility and preventative care.
The legislation before us today takes many of these guardrails out of the program. It removes many of the current provisions related to cost-sharing and it eliminates the trigger that would allow the state to end the program if federal funding for it went away or if the program no longer makes financial sense. Medicaid and similar programs are necessary to provide a safety net and help those who need help the most, but these programs are meant to help people temporarily, not forever. These changes in this legislation would strip away incentives for recipients to become more financially independent and move away from Medicaid coverage when possible. Taking away incentives to move out of poverty is never a good thing, and it certainly should not be celebrated.
It also promotes reliance on big government. The changes before us today promote big government as much—if not more—than healthcare. In early 2014, roughly 1.8 million Michiganders were in the state’s various Medicaid and children’s health insurance programs combined. In February of this year, the number has ballooned above 3 million. Obviously Michigan’s Medicaid expansion from a decade ago played a large part in this number increasing, but the more recent trends are not good. At least 500,000 more Michiganders are on Medicaid now than before the pandemic. That is just a couple of years, and in that time Michigan’s overall population has dropped.
I am all for a safety net, but that is not what our current welfare state offers. It offers dependency rather than independence. There is no reason why able-bodied adults who are capable of self-sufficiency should be prevented from a path of contributing to their community. There is a dignity one gains through earning a living and being responsible to others. Our welfare state misses this fact of our human nature and assumes people will be satisfied as long as their material wants and needs are met. We have over 60 years of experience to show this is not the case. In the places where the highest rates of government dependence are seen, we see poor results in student achievement, higher crime rates, and most ironically, greater poverty.
This bill moves our welfare state in the wrong direction. For these reasons I cannot support this legislation and I encourage my colleagues to vote “no.”
The following bill was read a third time:
House Bill No. 4496, entitled
A bill to amend 1939 PA 280, entitled “The social welfare act,” by amending sections 105b and 109f (MCL 400.105b and 400.109f), section 105b as added by 2007 PA 100 and section 109f as amended by 2017 PA 224; and to repeal acts and parts of acts.
The question being on the passage of the bill,
The bill was passed, a majority of the members serving voting therefor, as follows: