Musings from Brian J. Noggle: Some Want Full Irresponsibility For Their Actions

Some Want Full Irresponsibility For Their Actions

Headline in St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Some want unwed dads to pick up Medicaid’s birth costs:

Some Republican legislators want to charge unwed fathers thousands of dollars for hospital birth costs incurred by low-income mothers on Medicaid.

The twin goals: making fathers shoulder more responsibility and reducing taxpayers' costs.

"I don't intend for anything to be punitive at all for mom and baby," Senate Majority Leader Charlie Shields said at a recent meeting of the Missouri Medicaid Reform Commission, which he co-chairs.

"But the last time I checked, it takes two people to make a baby. And there is some responsibility, not just for child support, but for the cost of bringing that child successfully into the world," said Shields, R-St. Joseph.

A capital idea, I say. But the Post-Dispatch can find some to say otherwise:

Critics say mother and baby would suffer under Shields' proposal because some women would give up Medicaid and forgo prenatal care rather than cooperate in efforts to bill the father for hospital costs.

Some women would give up Medicaid because they didn't want to give up the father. The Post-Dispatch summons forth an anecdote about an unwed couple begatting their third child. Father's working sixty hours a week to support the family and thumps his chest in the article about taking on responsibility.

But his "responsibility" includes not paying for the actual babies prenatal care and by not marrying the mother because it would reduce her Medicaid eligibility. Also, his responsibility includes having a large family in his early twenties that he cannot support with a retail career.

I'd grade his responsibility at "incomplete" at best.

But I came not to judge this fellow; instead, I came to judge those critics who say that any state-based assumption of personal responsibility--personal fiscal responsibility--must be exposed as ill-advised and cold-hearted.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:03 AM