Herrenvolk Welfare State
By 
The laboratories of democracy reflect Republican priorities:
When the Trump administration announced it would allow states to institute Medicaid work requirements, policy experts warned that it could lead to racial discrimination. A proposal in the Michigan legislature that would exempt some counties from the requirement suggests how this could happen.
In Michigan, as the Detroit Free Press’s Nancy Kaffer noted, state lawmakers are pushing a plan that would require Medicaid recipients (with exceptions for the disabled, elderly, and a few other selected populations) to work or search for work at least 29 hours each week. If they fail to meet the work requirement, they could lose Medicaid coverage for a full year.
But the Michigan plan comes with a twist: People who live in counties with higher unemployment rates — above 8.5 percent — are exempted from the requirement. That is likely to lead in practice, as Kaffer observes, to rural whiter counties, where unemployment is higher, getting a break from these work requirements while urban areas with a higher share of black residents would still be subjected to them. Which means that black Medicaid enrollees would be more likely to lose their health insurance.
Clearly, the only reason Trump did better in Michigan than Mitt Romney is that Hillary Clinton didn’t visit enough.