No kings means rejecting automated monarchist systems.
I saw an interview with a lawyer talking about the disaster of Medicaid work requirements in Arkansas. The Amanpour and Company piece ends with how his organization is also addressing AI and automated inequality. And then after watching that, I see a bunch of supposedly people on the left, cheering on billionaire tycoon Mark Cuban on social media for suggesting that the answer to Medicaid cuts is just to automate the application process with AI.
As if they haven’t already tried that for years. and made it a mess, like everything else. There were quite a few people replying with why not just simplify these programs or make healthcare universal. But there were too many people going along with this as a solution, and many replying with dollar signs in their eyes suggesting their business is the one Mark Cuban should invest in for this.
The book Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks came out in 2018, and this contrived phenomenon has only ramped up. It sure seems deliberate. And we already know that the social insurance benefits system has been made more and more complicated over the years in a pretty openly blatant attempt to keep qualified people from actually getting what they’re supposed to get. The Medicaid funding cuts in the big boondoggle bill along with work requirements are supposed to do just that, that is how they intend to “control costs” supposedly. And that’s how somehow people like Rob Bresnahan feels he can claim he wasn’t voting specifically to kick his constituents off Medicaid, even though that’s exactly what the bill is designed to do.
The same topic of “helping people apply” as a solution to the big boondoggle bill Medicaid came up in an interview a couple weeks ago with Paul Krugman and Jonathan Gruber, the architect of Obamacare. The two of them were seemingly ignorant about the gatekeeping aspect of the Medicaid cuts that made my head hurt when I tried to watch it.. That guy and Paul Krugman were not specifically suggesting automation, but they suggested having private organizations help people navigate benefits, as if that’s the only problem with the work requirements, which would be a ridiculously simplistic misunderstanding of a problem that is just one piece of a big machine with multiple moving parts. And as if if politicians and officials and business interests haven’t already tried that for years, getting more and more privatized outsourcing involved, adding even more complexity to the entire benefits realm. And often it seems like just a strategy to deliberately cut government jobs with workers who might actually get paid a living wage with health insurance and retirement benefits because of having union representation, and replace them with privatized orgs using contract gig workers and such. In other words, it’s part of the privatization process and the race to the bottom, and ignoring that is ignoring a vast forest to focus on one tree as if it’s the only one in the world.
The irony is that more government workers would still probably be cheaper than outsourced privatized companies “helping” people from the outside, because the workers on the government side actually know what they’re doing. And I say that because I know that taxpayer money already goes toward outfits like that to help people apply for benefits. There’s a whole patchwork of private organizations that facilitate Medicaid and food stamp applications for people. Sometimes it’s the hospital that pays people to help hospitalized patients apply for Medicaid. And there are paid insurance agents that sell ACA plans and are required to have the people apply for Medicaid if they’re within a certain income where they might qualify because you’re not allowed ACA exchange subsidies if you qualify for Medicaid. There are also other operations that do outreach and assist and get funded to do that for some reason. I always suspected that some of these organizations are given grants based on volume because they often try to sign up people who don’t know what they’re applying for, wouldn’t want it if they did know, and don’t qualify, wasting everyone’s time and upsetting seniors who are often misled or confused.
And that’s before you get to the government benefits profiteering where people are using third party apps on their phone to manage their food stamp EBT cards, and some of them are fraudulent apps tricking people to get their card numbers and pins and steal their funds. And the reason people might download these apps by mistake and use them, even though states like Pennsylvania have their own official apps, is because there are “legitimate” third party apps that “help” people manage their EBT cards. The claim is that the app offers something that the official government app does not. Forbes reports about Propel Inc. that they make their money “generating revenue from card interchange fees and from marketers who pay to promote affordable products, such as low-cost Wi-Fi and groceries, on the platform”, but the startup is a private company that got investment money from Marc Andreesen and when tech tycoons are involved with “free” to the user products it’s normal to just suspect that these snap recipient app users are having their various types of their information collected.
All this is a complex network gravy train built upon the fact that these programs were made deliberately difficult to qualify for, or even to navigate them when qualified. They’re terribly underfunded so the apps and interfaces are less user friendly than the typical modern apps that are designed to be attractive, or even addictive. And Pennsylvania EBT doesn’t even have chip enabled EBT cards yet; CBS Philadelphia mentioned this at the end of their article on stolen EBT funds that there’s a bill to get chip enabled EBT cards that passed the state house but stalled in the PA state senate.
And then there are the straight up scam operations that advertise online, likely phishing of some sort that lures with promises of telling people about government programs they don’t know about. And if you think about it, these scams really couldn’t get enough traction to make it worth it if the general public feels very informed about their government’s programs and there’s transparency and simplicity in how one qualifies.
People who get listened to, like billionaire Mark Cuban, and even people who get paid to say things in public on these topics, like Paul Krugman, are so far removed from all this stuff that of course they’re out of touch and to someone who knows about this stuff they sound clueless. In Mark Cuban’s case, being a tycoon subjects you to the same pitfalls as any other authoritarian leader in society where people just won’t tell you the truth because they’re more likely to benefit from telling such a powerful person only what they want to hear, so moguls and other types of dictators sometimes just don’t get real information. And I somehow doubt Mark Cuban, or even Paul Krugman or Jonathan Gruber for that matter, have ever sought out a podcast to listen to like Krissy Clark’s meticulously reported podcasts about the profiteering by outsourced privatized third parties in the “welfare to work” TANF “welfare reform” program. For that matter, the people at the top making the decisions about these programs are often clueless about how they work in practice. Some politicians find out stuff when their constituents write and call them for help with problems, but that’s not as often as you might think for a variety of reasons. So I think these people are out of touch and that’s why they seem completely clueless. They never have to suffer the consequences to any of this, so it’s all abstract to them.
A lot of the problem is profiteering and indeed privatization grifting. But I think it’s time to be honest and connect the dots here about how all these things are part of the same eugenics project from ideological monarchists who believe they’re rich and important via something divine or because they’re meritoriously and righteously rewarded because they deserve it, and that this gives them the right to run roughshod over the rest of society, and most particularly the working class.