Praying for the poor was always a harmless offense in the halls of government, as long as you never insinuated that leaders should actually help the downtrodden and infirm. But last week, it got a Jesuit priest fired as the chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Back in December, Father Patrick J. Conroy prayed that, like Jesus, congressmen might consider the poor while they were passing big tax cuts for the well-to-do. Even after a warning from House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) not to engage in “politics” again, the old chaplain kept mentioning the poor in his brief homilies, as you would expect a man who took a vow of poverty to do. So Ryan gave him the boot.

Advertisement

In the old days, I sometimes heard chaplains in the Arkansas legislature intone a few pious words for “the least fortunate among us,” but the lawmakers never read enough into the invocations to take umbrage. Today, I’m not sure a preacher will get a pass for even meekly taking the wrong side in the poverty wars, as Ryan thought the good padre did.

We call things wars with less justification than the disagreements over poverty. Ryan and the other fathers of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 say that starting next year they will trim the giant deficits created by the tax cuts by slashing entitlements — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — and poverty programs like food and housing assistance. Now it looks like they won’t have the votes to do that next year.

Advertisement

But here in Arkansas they do. Governor Hutchinson will institute big cuts in medical insurance for poor adults this spring by making Medicaid enrollees get on their laptops every two months and prove they are working at least 80 hours a month, engaged in work-related activities or else exempt from the state’s new work requirement. If they can’t do that, they lose their health care for the year.

Wait: They probably don’t have computers or email accounts, wouldn’t have a clue about how to use them or to build the evidence needed to keep their insurance, and may not live someplace with easy broadband coverage. The state’s answer: This will give them the energy to join the digital society.

Advertisement

The governor and his Department of Human Services chief said the work rule and all the bureaucratic hoops are not intended to punish poor people but just the opposite, to force them to improve their skills, get into the workforce and live happier lives. You have to wonder whether it is naivete or politics. Governor Hutchinson’s defenders say he has to look tough by punishing the freeloaders or else the Republican legislature and his party will abandon him. Promising to dump the lazy from the Medicaid rolls helped round up the votes to keep the Medicaid expansion, which has brought hundreds of millions of dollars annually into the economy and pumped up the treasury.

Building a bureaucratic maze that poor and uneducated people must navigate does exactly what it is intended to do. They give up.

Advertisement

The first step, starting three years ago, was to set up a complicated and hasty process to renew your Medicaid coverage. About 59,000 people lost their insurance because they couldn’t do it.

Several other states that adopted the Medicaid expansion offered by Obamacare are taking similar steps to make work a requirement to get health insurance, although they seem to me to clearly violate the rules for getting waivers from the Obamacare coverage procedures. The law had one overriding objective — to insure more people, not fewer.

Advertisement

There has always been a popular notion that poverty is willful and that both physical and mental disabilities are usually self-inflicted and thus unforgiveable. They are happy with the bare existence that they can maintain with a little government assistance. Ignorance and unhealthy lifestyles do not earn them much sympathy.

The story is actually much different. A large number of those who can’t meet the work requirement have mental or physical disabilities, or both, or else suffer from chronic illnesses that deter them from seeking jobs or employers from hiring them. Disabled people are already covered by Social Security, the state says.

Advertisement

Social Security’s definition of disability is so narrow that most of the nonelderly disabled — some 64,000 on the Medicaid rolls — are not eligible for Social Security coverage. People can’t just decide they will go to work. Some employer must hire them.

Medical groups like the American Medical Association strenuously opposed the Arkansas rule and others like it.

Legislators cheered the governor’s work requirement without a thought to the human beings who would suffer. It was only one of their good works in the 2017-18 sessions. They also passed a statute and a proposed constitutional amendment to discourage poor people from voting in the guise of stopping people from casting the votes of people who don’t make it to the polls, and still another constitutional amendment that will limit what ordinary people can get from nursing homes and other providers that harm them or their loved ones through neglect or abuse. They’ve got the poor on the run.