A Republican state lawmaker in Arkansas, who was injured in a drunk driving accident, and relied on Medicaid to cover most of the one million dollars in medical expenses he incurred, is denying Medicaid to others. Arkansas Representative Josh Miller was paralyzed in a car accident 11 years ago. He and a friend were fortified with alcohol and decided to go for a drive. He was apparently so intoxicated that he does not recall which one of them was driving, but the pickup they were in drove off a ravine. Miller survived, but he suffered a broken neck and paralysis.
Fortunately, the extensive trauma care, rehabilitation and daily personal care assistance he needed was covered by Medicaid. Now the lawmaker, age 33, is paying it forward. Well, actually no he is not. Instead, the Republican is voting to deny Medicaid access to many fellow Arkansans under the premise that it is a handout that they do not deserve.
In his efforts to deny Medicaid to others he must imagine that some people are less deserving than a young able-bodied white guy who in a drunken binge jumped into a pickup truck he or his friend had no business driving and injured himself. Yes, in his mind some of those people less deserving than him are probably African-American or Latino. Or perhaps they are single mothers trying to raise children on their own. Maybe they live in some undeserving place like Little Rock instead of his 98 percent white community of Heber Springs. Some of them might not even drink alcohol.
Whatever, the case, they surely are not as deserving as Josh Miller, who with no sense of irony, has had the government finance his recovery to the tune of nearly a million dollars. However, like so many in the modern GOP, now that he got his, why should he walk in someone else’s shoes and allow any “low life moochers” to collect the kind of “handouts” that helped him survive? He deserves it, but they, whoever “they” are do not.
Edited/Published by: SB
