Last month, the Maine House of Representatives came up with and passed a bipartisan supplemental budget that would have filled a multimillion-dollar hole in MaineCare payments to rural hospitals and health care facilities (and also funded treatments for spruce budworm, a nasty little creature that we don’t want running rampant in our woods).

But then, technically unexpectedly — though if you’re used to conservative obstructionism, very expectedly — Senate Republicans voted it down. Now hospitals won’t get their money until at least June. Which, if the recent layoffs at Maine General and Northern Light are anything to go by, is two months our state health systems do not have.

Given that Republicans tend to represent rural areas with a lot of patients on MaineCare, why would they want to make their constituents’ lives harder? Because they wanted to institute work requirements for MaineCare, and they wanted to do it during the budget process. I can only assume they knew their constituents wouldn’t want their health insurance taken away.

Medicaid work requirements are one of those things that sound great in theory but are kind of terrible in real life. First of all, out of the 26.1 million Medicaid recipients who aren’t receiving Social Security benefits due to age or disability, 64% are already working (44% full time, 20% part time, if you want the breakdown). They just tend to be working in crappy, low-paying jobs that don’t offer good health care benefits, if they offer benefits at all.

It’s going to take a lot more than a work requirement for Washington County to have a job that comes with private health insurance benefits for every resident who wants one. Of course, anyone proposing work requirements always says it’s just for “able-bodied” people. What they don’t say is there is no legal or medical definition of “able-bodied.” It’s a subjective term, in the eye of the beholder, and I don’t really want that beholder to be a conservative who wants to cut government benefits no matter the costs to citizens.

A person might have a physical disability that prevents them from stocking shelves for a living, but they might be just fine at a call-center desk. Work requirements often ignore any caregiving responsibilities other than ones for children under 18. If you have a disabled spouse or elderly parents that you are the primary caregiver for — well, too bad, no PCP visits for you, you moocher.

The Government Accountability Office — an independent, nonpartisan federal government agency that does audits and evaluations — estimates that the administrative costs to implement the work requirement monitoring system is between $10 million and $250 million, depending on the state. Not a real money saver. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office — a nonpartisan government agency dedicated solely to crunching numbers for Congress, some of the most important nerds in the country — found that work requirements led to an increase in state costs, an increase in the number of uninsured people and no change on employment status. This is largely because people who can work are already working.

MaineCare doesn’t put a roof over your head, food on the table or gas in the car. It certainly doesn’t afford you the little luxuries that make life more enjoyable — new clothes, dinner out, scented candles (just me?). All work requirements do is cause people to lose their health coverage because of bureaucratic issues — paperwork filled out incorrectly or filed late, things like that.

Work requirements don’t work. They cost money, don’t increase employment and cause people to lose health coverage. That should be the end of the discussion. But it’s not, because at the end of the day, this isn’t a debate about facts. It’s about feelings. Specifically, the negative feelings Republicans have about people who are struggling financially. Conservatives don’t like government, they don’t like poor people, and they especially don’t like government programs that help poor people. They believe being poor is a moral failure and people should be punished for it.

Work requirements are a great way to kick people off their health insurance and make it look like it’s their own fault. Also, on a practical level, taking away people’s ability to afford health care makes them less employable. Employers want healthy employees, not sick ones. I assume career politicians might have forgotten that.

Republicans seem to believe that MaineCare is a generous government-funded luxury that recipients must jump through hoops for to prove that they deserve. It’s not. It’s just health insurance. And not every doctor’s office accepts it. The “best” offices with the nicest buildings and the highest-paid staff don’t. I can tell you this from personal experience. I’ve been on MaineCare twice in my life: once as a child, through CHIP (the Children’s Health Insurance Program) and once as an adult, during the worst of the COVID pandemic in 2020.

In 2020, I was on it for about nine months while unemployed because the economy had done a face-plant. If there had been work requirements, I probably wouldn’t have been able to be on MaineCare. I was “able-bodied,” but there were no jobs to be had. Even if there were, the COVID-19 vaccine hadn’t been developed yet and I was living with my mom, who has a history of serious lung infections. Exposing myself to people outside our household meant putting her at risk of death. My green-and-white MaineCare card meant I could see my doctor when I got shingles. That’s it. Doesn’t everyone deserve that?