Making Medicaid a Tool for Moral Education May Let Some Die<br />They will have to pay for it, too — a premium starting at $1 per month for families living on up to one-quarter of the federal poverty line, or about $400 a month for a family of three (such families exist, apparently)<br />and rising to $15 for those who manage to stay above the poverty threshold.<br />In 2005, Tennessee removed 170,000 people — almost one in 10 Medicaid beneficiaries in the state,<br />mainly working-age adults without children — from its Medicaid program to save money.<br />Today, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program covers only one of five poor families in the state.<br />In 15 states, antipoverty cash benefits reach fewer than 10 percent of the families with children in poverty.<br />In all of them, the change was sold as a way to encourage poor Americans to get off their backsides, get a job<br />and prosper on their own — free of the clutches of the welfare state.
