In the first part of Buttigieg’s plan, he says he is going to automatically enroll the millions of uninsured people with incomes low enough to already be eligible for free insurance:
Upon reading this, you should wonder to yourself: how on earth is the bureaucracy going to be able to automatically determine, in real time, who the low income people are that are eligible for free insurance?
Remember, the people he is talking about here are not people who come into the welfare office and fill out forms recording their income information. These are the people who, despite being eligible, never come into the system at all. And so to automatically enroll them, you have to somehow find them. But how would you go about doing that?
When you follow Buttigieg’s citations, you wind up at a Third Way report…
When you keep going in the Third Way report that Buttigieg cites to, you eventually get linked to the Pathway to Universal Coverage Act of 2018, which is apparently supposed to be the way we administratively tackle this automatic enrollment challenge. The problem here is that the bill doesn’t actually provide any way of identifying eligible people for automatic enrollment. Instead it proposes granting money to states so that maybe they can innovate a way to do this.
Nobody has any idea how you could possibly identify people in real time who slip into eligibility but never go to the welfare office to fill out the forms. This is because it is not possible.
This is what it currently looks like. Will add California later this year. It’s the product of living most of my life in Wisconsin and the last few years in Iowa, and most of my vacations for a large part of my life having been road trips.
I really want to work through most of the rest of my missing states and just leave two islands of Alabama and West Virginia alone as states I haven’t visited.
I think I’ve at least driven through every state except for Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, the Dakotas, and Alaska.
Culturally, West Virginia deserves every bad thing that’s ever been said about it, but it’s absolutely gorgeous country and worth at least driving through imo.
I can’t think of anything nice to say about Alabama.
