Following Trump’s lead, there’s a bill in the state legislature to require all Medicaid recipients in Michigan to work at least 30 hours a week to remain eligible for the program. But as the Detroit Free Press reports, it exempts residents of rural counties, who are mostly white, but not residents of inner cities, who are mostly black.
Because although HB 897 threatens to end Medicaid benefits for hundreds of thousands living elsewhere in the state, it includes exemptions for people who live in counties with an unemployment rate of more than 8.5%, like the ones Schmidt represents.
Live in Detroit? You’re out of luck.
The city’s unemployment rate is higher than 8.5%, but the unemployment rate in surrounding Wayne County is just 5.5% — meaning Detroiters living in poverty, with a dysfunctional transit system that makes it harder to reach good-paying jobs, won’t qualify for that exemption. The same is true in Flint and the state’s other struggling cities.
Get that? Rural residents of up-north counties with high unemployment are protected; urban Michiganders who live in high-unemployment cities in more prosperous counties are left to twist.
I knew Wayne Schmidt when he was in high school, when he debated for Traverse City High School. Not a bad debater, and not a bad kid. But this bill is obnoxious on multiple levels, including the fact that it treats minorities differently than white people, whether that was intentional or not. Unfortunately, Republicans have total control of the state government thanks to some of the worst and most blatant political gerrymandering in the country after the 2010 census.
This is one reason why the distinction between political and racial gerrymandering is an artificial and absurd one. Even if the gerrymander was done for purely political reasons, the end result is the adoption of policies with a clearly racist effect. Why does intent matter more than actual results?
















