The Brawler was surprised and disappointed by Rick "Shark and Shepherd" Esenberg's article "Making Wisconsin the Health Care Migration Capital" in the latest issue of the WPRI's house organ, Wisconsin Interest.
He was surprised because when Esenberg made his central point on his blog -- that, if enacted, Healthy Wisconsin would be a magnet for sick folks across the country -- it was shot down by Seth Zlotocha. Zlotocha effectively noted that BadgerCare already picked up the costs for kids of low-income parents -- and had not caused a massive influx of health care chiselers.
The Brawler was disappointed because in his piece Esenberg says this:
Wisconsin was once a welfare magnet, drawing people from states where benefits were, at the very most, several hundreds dollars per month lower than they were here. The stakes are much larger here as we run the risk of becoming a magnet for those who are likely to incur tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in health care costs.
The Brawler was disappointed with this because there is no proof -- none -- that Wisconsin's welfare benefits were a magnet for poor people from other states. It was a fine bit of race baiting by Tommy Thompson. But there was no evidence that welfare benefits played any role in attracting people to Wisconsin.
From the 2/5/89 Los Angeles Times:
A study commissioned by the state three years ago concluded that, by and large, the answer was "no." Paul Voss, a University of Wisconsin demographer who authored the report, said interviews with thousands of newly arrived welfare recipients found that the overwhelming reasons most gave for moving were to be near family and friends. "Lowering welfare benefits is not going to make much of a dent in the flood of migrants," Voss predicted.
How little evidence was there that welfare bennies were drawing people to Wisconsin? So little that even the WPRI could insinuate, but it couldn't assert, a connection:
From the same story:
However, a recent study by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a Milwaukee-based conservative think tank, hints that the answer may be "yes." According to the report, which analyzed three years of residency data for welfare applicants, newcomers accounted for 29% of all newly opened AFDC cases statewide and 43% of all the new cases in the Milwaukee area and other counties close to Illinois.
John Wahner, one of the authors, cautioned that his report made no attempt to conclude why welfare recipients were flocking here. Still, Wahner, a former Democratic leader in the state Assembly and until recently head of the Milwaukee County Department of Health and Human Services, said the study raised "disturbing" questions.
"I think it's honest to ask whether in addition to coping with our own poor, do we really have to be responsible for everybody who comes up the interstate," he said.
It's disappointing Esenberg would make this sort of unsubstantiated claim. You expect it from Sykes. You expect a little more from the Shark.
It's even more disappointing given that the Shark is one of the few conservative voices who actually engages in the issue of poverty and he passes along this bunk.
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