It's always hard for me to figure out which of the many absurd pronouncements by Trump administration officials is most deserving of ridicule. This statement by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins came out on top today.
I'm not sure what the "34 million able-bodied on Medicaid" refers to. There are about 41 million adults on Medicaid, with a bit over 7 million aged 65 or older, so Rollins seems to be speaking about every adult on Medicaid aged 19 to 64 (41 million minus 7 million equals 34 million).
But only 8% of the 34 million, or about 3.3 million, reported that they are retired, unable to find work, or were not working for another reason. I guess these are the folks who the Agriculture Secretary thinks will be jumping at the chance to work in fields, often doing (literally) back-breaking labor.
As a pleasingly sarcastic MSNBC story about the Agriculture Secretary's remarks points out, Rollins seems to want the United States to act like communist Russia or China in forcing people to work on farms.
In other words, as the agriculture secretary sees it, there’s no need for concern about farmers losing out on immigrant labor because those workers can be replaced thanks to “automation” and Medicaid beneficiaries.
A lot of words come to mind when trying to describe such an approach, but for now, let’s go with “flawed.”
Right off the bat, let’s note the fact that most Americans on Medicaid already have jobs, so they won’t be available to pick crops and replace the victims of the White House’s mass deportation campaign.
What’s more, many Medicaid beneficiaries live in urban areas, which tend to be nowhere near farms, and I have a hunch the administration doesn’t intend to pay for an elaborate travel-reimbursement program to shuttle city residents to and from agricultural areas. (History offers some examples of regimes that forced urban residents to work on farms, but the Trump administration should probably try to avoid emulating Stalin’s five-year plan.)
Alas, there’s no reason to stop there. It’s also true, for example, that many Americans on Medicaid have physical disabilities and/or live in nursing homes, so asking them to work in fields to collect produce for consumers probably won’t go well.
But what I find myself stuck on is Rollins’ quote in the context of the Republicans’ domestic policy megabill. GOP policymakers approved sweeping and unprecedented cuts to Medicaid, arguing that Americans who lose coverage can simply get jobs that offer health insurance.
It’s against this backdrop that the secretary of agriculture suggested that Medicaid beneficiaries — whose coverage is at risk — can replace immigrants as farmworkers, brushing past the inconvenient fact that farmworkers tend not to get health care coverage.
All of which is to say, if the administration is counting on Americans on Medicaid replacing immigrants on farms, officials should probably start working on a Plan B.
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