July 31, 2017 11:06 AM UTC

Brauchler Says Drug Test Medicaid Recipients, Just To Be Nice

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• by: Colorado Pols

Almost lost in all he political news out of Washington, D.C. last week was this nugget from the Colorado Independent that we didn’t want to escape mention:

George Brauchler, who has gotten health insurance through the Army since he was on active duty, likes what the Republican governors of Wisconsin, Arizona and Kentucky have done. Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, for instance, asked the Trump administration for approval to drug test Medicaid recipients. Brauchler wouldn’t want to do it as a way to kick people off the insurance rolls, he says, but to as a vehicle to find out who needs state-funded help for rehabilitation. [Pols emphasis]

“That’s the kind of thing I think we ought to be doing here and we ought to be looking at,” he says, adding that he likes the idea of work requirements for able-bodied residents on Medicaid, a plan GOP governor Matt Bevin in Kentucky wants to implement to control costs there. (Kentucky’s former governor, Democrat Steve Beshear, expanded Medicaid under Obamacare.) In Arizona, state officials under GOP Gov. Doug Ducey asked for federal approval to require able-bodied residents on Medicaid to either have a job or be looking for one if they want to stay enrolled. Brauchler believes such programs incentivize people to get “off the Medicaid dole.”

The proposal to subject Medicaid patients or other recipients of public benefits submit to drug testing is not new in Colorado–a couple of years ago, Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg ran into criticism after he proposed something similar for welfare benefits, leading to calls for recipients of federal crop subsidies (Sonnenberg has received over $600,000) to be whiz-quizzed as well. Similar attempts to drug test recipients of cash welfare has revealed that the rate of drug use among beneficiaries is far less than the general population.

As for Brauchler’s more compassionate alleged purpose for drug testing Medicaid recipients–to get them treatment instead of cutting them off? You can evaluate for yourself how that would play out in practice.

We expect it’s a lot like Cory Gardner’s Medicaid promises.