Day Drinking and Research in the Right Order
Number 11, Investigate. Do it after you sober up.
Lesson 11 from Timothy Snyder is
Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the Internet is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad). Take responsibility for what you communicate to others.
Luke starts work very early in the morning. Incomprehensibly so. And that is after a gym workout. He has a 50 mile race coming up which is a tune up for the 100 mile run he signed up for a couple months from now.
But since he starts work so early, he finishes early. So “beers after work” with him is pretty much day drinking for me.
We are both at an age where more than a couple beers have costs for us. But sometimes we drink them anyway, enjoying each other’s company. This Thursday, we did.
Luke and I love each other. We say so. We hug hello and goodbye. But we disagree. The things we disagree about do not come up in conversation that much, but if, in the natural flow of our sunny conversation something like publicly-funded health care comes up, we are pretty good at talking it through respectfully.
Part of that respect is knowing that we get information from different places. We never see the same news articles. The stats and facts and anecdotal videos sticking to our memories are completely different.
This was the day the House of Representatives was passing the big bill. I had been calling my Republican rep every day and urging others to do so. It was the day before the Fourth of July, when I ride with my family in our hometown parade on these weird vehicles my Dad has built over the years.
Luke is thoughtful, and he asks questions in careful ways. This one was something like, “Doesn’t California use Medicaid or something for illegals?”
I had heard some vague things on that, and I mumbled (too many sun-drenched beers in) that I didn’t think that was true, I didn’t think they could do that.
But really I was not sure. Neither of us were.
In the morning, with some aggressive hydration, I opened up my laptop and asked the question.
Not of ChatGPT or of any other LLM that would summarize hallucinations.
Not of Google, who is collecting data on what I search for then seemingly giving me what I want to hear.
I have been using Kagi for search of late. By paying a little money for search I feel more confident that I am the customer they are seeking to satisfy, not advertisers or data-accruers.
It is a lovely world we live in where you can do research in the form of your question, however I understand that there are people crafting pages to look like the answer to that question in order to get you to read them. The source matters. I often read the about page of a website that comes up in search.
I asked
does medicaid care for illegal immigrants*
Here are the titles and resources that first came up, in order:
CMS Increasing Oversight on States Illegally Using Federal … cms.gov
Fact Sheet: Undocumented Immigrants and Federal Health Care Benefits…immigrationforum.org
The Truth About Medicaid Coverage for Immigrants…ccf.georgetown.edu
A False Claim About Illegal Immigration and Medicaid - FactCheck.org…factcheck.org
I did not look at the first, governments site. It was updated after Trump took office. It will be propaganda.
Immigration Forum is not a group I am familiar with, but I expect that they have a point of view. Not sure what it is. This is the kind of page that I suspect was crafted to respond to my search.
I use Fact Check and Snopes regularly to research specific claims I see on Facebook, but I am looking for broader understanding today.
I right-clicked and chose open in new tab for the Georgetown University article. It might require wading through a lot of — perhaps interesting — content. But academia can have checks and balances in the reporting. Their have been instances of bias, but with peer review and professional accountability, I tend to believe them.
I opened up the KFF (formerly Kaiser Family Foundation) page. They are to me a legitimate research organization. I do believe that they have a point of view but they are proud of their accurate research. I trust their summaries and clicked on that link.
It had everything I needed to understand the truth between what Luke and I understood. I did not read policy or advocacy in what they published. No “therefores.” Far less preachy than I would ever be.
This is some of what I learned.
Medicaid can not be used for undocumented immigrants. There are some exceptions:
Some portion of a category called emergency Medicaid Spending reimburses hospitals for emergency care they are obligated to provide to individuals who meet other Medicaid eligibility requirements (such as income) but who do not have an eligible immigration status. The total spending on this kind of emergency care was 0.4%. Some portion of that was for illegal immigrants.
Lawful immigrants only qualify five years after they become legal.
This is important: 24 states provide more Medicaid coverage to certain py present people, like pregnant women and low-income children. This is allowed under Medicaid rules. I don’t know how much money that costs.
14 states pay from their own budgets coverage to children and pregnant women, regardless of status.
7 states pay from their own budgets health care for illegal immigrants.
I also learned that the total immigrant population of the U.S. is 7%. The total illegal immigrant population is around 2.8%. That number sounds small, but the total number of 11 million sounds really big. I don’t really think well on that scale.
Read the related piece,
It took me about 10 minutes to read all this. I trust that Luke is not making things up and that when we talk he is trying to understand his world and what his friend Joel believes. I also know that like me it is hard to even find information that is different than what you believe. I texted him:
I looked up illegal immigrants on Medicaid. States are not allowed to use federal money for anything except pregnancy and birth care for illegal residents.
Several states, including California and Oregon, use state (not federal) money to provide care to some illegal residents. That is, the states elected officials passed laws. The Trump law passed yesterday penalizes them by paying them less for our care.
I got back
:emoji: Thanks for the clarification.
He also said to have a good time with my family at the parade.
I have no idea if it is a good idea for a state to pay for health care for illegal immigrants. I imagine that it is better to have healthy people than more emergency room visits. My Christian belief is that we should care for every individual that we can. But yet I don’t know how much that is actually costing. I am open to it being a big topic worthy of discussion.
People are exhausted by claims and confusion. They have stopped believing truth is findable because they spend their time in large swaths of the Internet that are not incentivized for truth and so are not interested in truth. But I find it. I find small truths that lead to bigger questions. I find truths that open up conversations.
You can search in a way that is not influenced by outside interests. You can validate your sources (start by reading their about page. Then, see if there is a wikipedia article about them. Then, search for the website name and look at the news results.)
Do your research in solitude, away from influence. Stay calm. Know the fear that you can’t know in advance what you will find. I find things that are inconvenient for me. The joke on social media nowadays is when someone confidently says “I did my research” but we all know they just read pages they agreed with. They discovered more proof of what they already believed. Research might discover that your belief needs to be modified. Or that you just don’t know as much as you thought you did.
Thanks for spending the time to do research and admitting to some day drinking. :)
How is it going? Shall we jump to E/OS and Murena or Proton together?