GOP senator insists 'Biblically, you're supposed to work' to earn medical care

Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV) defended the GOP's planned deep cuts to Medicaid that could kick over 10 million low-income people off health insurance.

According to The Independent's D.C. bureau chief Eric Michael Garcia, when confronted over the plan in President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" to force states to institute work requirements for Medicaid, Justice said, "Biblically, we are supposed to work."

"We have taken the dignity and the hope and the belief away from a lot of people where they are hopeless, they think they can't," he said.

Under Trump's previous term, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services allowed individual states to experiment with work requirements. The program failed, having no discernible impact on employment and leading to thousands of people, including some who were working, to be thrown off coverage. Ultimately, these programs were shot down as illegal in federal court.

The Senate bill's version of the work requirements is even more draconian than those in the House, also applying to parents of children over age 14. This would affect up to 380,000 more people.

In addition, the Senate plans to sharply curtail the amount of provider taxes states can use to get matching funds for their Medicaid programs, which could devastate rural hospitals so badly that the GOP is considering including a fund to bail them out.

Justice, who inherited a coal mining business and was a billionaire before his net worth was wiped out by extensive debt, has nonetheless warned his fellow senators that other aspects of the bill's cuts could be going too far, including a proposal to force states to pay more of the cost of the food stamp program.