Young Unemployed Men on Medicaid are (Mostly) Disabled
Where are the “young men who should never be on [Medicaid] at all,” Speaker Johnson?
If you have been paying attention to all of the novel awfulness coming out of Washington, you may have missed the bog standard nastiness coming down the pike. That is, Republicans are ramping up to slash Medicaid again, Trump’s promises to the contrary now more water under the bridge.
Matt Bruenig published a fun little piece on the People’s Policy Project website last Friday preemptively dismantling conservatives’ claims that young men are not working because of Medicaid. As he put it: “man cannot live on doctor visits alone.”
Analyzing Current Population Survey data from the last two years, Bruenig found over 30 percent of the one-in-ten young men (20-25 years old) who aren’t in school or employed when they’re first surveyed will find a job at some point before they’re rotated out of the survey pool for the second and final time.
He didn’t explicitly look at whether Medicaid actually had any effects on job-seeking though. And I needed a somewhat compelling reason to put off doing research for a term paper.
So I spent an open Friday night in my 20’s downloading an excerpt of CPS data covering 2010 through 2019 and messing around in Stata. Specifically, I used the CPS’ Annual Social and Economic Supplement to determine whether people were actually enrolled in Medicaid and then calculated roughly the same measure Bruenig did: whether a young male respondent who was unemployed and not in school in month 1 found a job in survey months 2-8.1
And… I found that young unemployed men who weren’t in school and were on Medicaid were markedly less likely to find a job over the next fifteen months than young men in the same situation who weren’t on Medicaid.
The conservatives were right all along. Medicaid is really being taken advantage of by lazy twenty-something men who should be working in the factory or, better yet, the coal mines instead of playing on their Nintendo.
Time for the rending of liberal garments and gnashing of leftist teeth.
And by markedly less likely, I mean the odds were roughly halved: Around 34 percent of the young men of interest on Medicaid found a job at some point, compared to almost 60 percent of young men who weren’t on Medicaid.
So after doing some quick work to see if Medicaid expansion had any notable impact on job-seeking behavior (it didn’t, despite a ~50% increase in Medicaid coverage in states that expanded it), I emailed my initial results to Bruenig in the hopes he might have some thoughts.
He then helpfully pointed out something I was frankly embarrassed to not have already considered. That is, a lot of the young men who both make an effort to be on Medicaid rather than go uninsured and don’t have a job are probably disabled.
So I redownloaded a new CPS extract that included responses to questions about disability status.
In that extract, there were 990 men between 20 and 25 years old that recorded being on Medicaid within the last year and answered all 8 surveys. Just 317 of those men weren’t either in school or employed the first month they were surveyed.
Of those 317, only 209 didn’t report having a job during one of the eight months that they were surveyed. 100 of the 209 said that they have some physical or cognitive difficulty. 106 said they either have a health problem or disability “which prevents him/her from working or which limits the kind or amount of work.”
Only 83 said they didn’t have either some physical or cognitive difficulty or a disability or health problem that impedes working.
And out of those 83, a whole 49 of them did not either report looking for work or actually working within the last year. Then, after the 8 month pause built into the CPS, when those 49 men were surveyed again, only 30 reported being on Medicaid within the last year.
That’s just 3 percent of our initial sample of young men. Young, able-bodied men deciding to stay at home and play video games instead of going to college or finding a job aren’t the folks benefiting from Medicaid.
Medicaid beneficiaries are exactly the people the program is meant to help: low-income families, children2, people with physical and/or mental disabilities, anyone who has temporarily fallen on hard times, and those who have been looking for work but can’t find it.
If Republicans deliver on the House’s budget resolution and gut Medicaid, the people left unable to afford a doctor visit won’t be listless 21 year old layabouts siphoning up your tax money. They’ll be single mothers, residents of Rust Belt towns, and Americans of every age left struggling to pay their rent on minimum wage.
Just look at what’s been happening in Georgia.
Here are the best things I’ve read recently:
Christopher Ketcham’s profile of a “livestock saboteur” for The Baffler
Mark Chiusano on Zohran Mamdani’s media strategy for Politico
And Jessy Edwards on NYC removing a landlord for Hell Gate
And a few things that I’ve written for the Alabama Political Reporter:
A piece about the looming termination of leases for OSHA and MSHA offices in the state
An article about the House Education Policy committee passing a bill to mandate putting the Ten Commandments in schools and expand the “Don’t Say Gay” law
And a general write-up of Senate Republicans’ bonkers plan to avoid saying they’ll increase the deficit
Everyone surveyed for the CPS in March is asked additional, more specific questions about their economic situation (including health insurance). Unfortunately, before 2019 people were only asked if they were covered by Medicaid within the last year, not whether they are currently covered by Medicaid, so there is some slippage here.