Hot take: If you can't afford insurance you shouldn't be having a dozen kids, or at least shouldn't complain when others don't want to subsidize that. But $10k per kid for an average of 2 kids in a lifetime does not exactly make for a huge cliff. The income limit for Medicaid is so low in most places, getting any kind of job will disqualify you. But the money from the job will be of more utility than some bare minimum free healthcare. There's no way that a few healthy kids costs thousands per month. Maybe insurance could if you had more than 2 kids, but most people don't even need that much insurance. I never had medical insurance in my life until I got my first job out of college.

There may be some people who believe they will lose money overall by working, but they're usually wrong. Do taxes and losses of freebies reduce the marginal benefit of working more? I'd say so. But in most cases it is still a net benefit to work more.

There is no way to say this without sounding rude, but you clearly don't understand how insane healthcare costs are when you have kids.

Premiums alone could be close to a 1k a month for a family plan. At best you're paying 500 a month in premiums, and that is guaranteed to have a 5k+10k deductible before anything is covered by insurance. Then you will probably still have a co-insurance.

The notion that Medicaid is so crappy is some terrible insurance is propaganda. Free vs paying tens of thousands of dollars, and still be flooded with medical bills, is all you need to know which one is better.

I know dozens of people with medicaid and they absolutely refuse to lose it, especially the ones with large families. If you, or someone in your family, have chronic health issues then you are basically guaranteed to be paying 10k in healthcare premiums and deductibles when you lose Medicaid and get private insurance.

>The notion that Medicaid is so crappy is some terrible insurance is propaganda. Free vs paying tens of thousands of dollars, and still be flooded with medical bills, is all you need to know which one is better.

>There is no way to say this without sounding rude, but you clearly don't understand how insane healthcare costs are when you have kids.

I know how expensive the extremes are. Most kids don't need much healthcare. I'm not interested in arguing that with you. If you know, you know.

>Premiums alone could be close to a 1k a month for a family plan. At best you're paying 500 a month in premiums, and that is guaranteed to have a 5k+10k deductible before anything is covered by insurance. Then you will probably still have a co-insurance.

This is because people have "insurance" that pays for basic routine things. It's more like a price-gouging payment plan or a security blanket. If you got insurance only for severe situations with a high deductible, and paid for routine stuff out of pocket, you'd come out ahead I think. I happen to have a pretty good insurance plan with a low deductible but I didn't have one until I was almost 30. Nor did I qualify for Medicaid or anything else.

The free health care is not actually free. We all pay for it. Even poor people's taxes go toward healthcare that they might not use. Secondly, your choices on this "free" healthcare are somewhat limited. Good luck finding a doctor and getting an appointment in a timely fashion. And some of these doctors specifically maximize services and visits to milk the government for as much as they can.

>I know dozens of people with medicaid and they absolutely refuse to lose it, especially the ones with large families. If you, or someone in your family, have chronic health issues then you are basically guaranteed to be paying 10k in healthcare premiums and deductibles when you lose Medicaid and get private insurance.

Again I say, if you are poor you should not go out and start a large family. People who have expensive chronic conditions they can't help, or have like 1 kid with that, are kind of an exception.

Back to the original point. I think not working more because of Medicaid eligibility is stupid. If we're talking about the difference between working 5% more hours at the same job and not, then I get it. But we aren't gonna see people give up $40k+ jobs just so they can get Medicaid. Even if they were, it's not a problem with means testing in principle. Each person's circumstances are unique, and the system needs to make people pay when they can. Even as shitty as the system is, we can't afford it. It's on track to be in the red by tens of trillions of dollars. By the time all the bills come due, it might be quadrillions of dollars, due to inflation. I'm not even joking...