Politics & Power Quote by Michael Burgess

Burgess is doing something cleverer than mere budget scolding: he reframes Medicaid dependence as a rational response to a rigged information system. The key move is “hidden.” Taxes aren’t just high; they’re obscured, dispersed across “income, property, and business activities” so the public can’t easily connect what they pay with what they get. If you can’t see the bill, the argument goes, you can’t make cost-conscious choices, and you drift into the default payer: Medicaid.

The subtext is a critique of the American habit of treating long-term care as both inevitable and someone else’s tab. Burgess is tapping a genuine policy oddity: Medicaid is the nation’s primary long-term care insurer, but you typically qualify only after “spending down” assets. That structure quietly encourages middle-class families to plan around impoverishment rules rather than build transparent, pre-funded coverage through private insurance or personal savings. By calling reliance “no wonder,” he turns what’s often moralized as personal failure into predictable behavior produced by incentives.

Context matters: as a Republican congressman and physician, Burgess is speaking into the long-running fight over entitlements, state budgets, and who should bear the rising costs of aging. The quote sidesteps the politically radioactive fact that long-term care is catastrophically expensive and unevenly distributed. Instead, it implies that if people truly felt the price of care up front, demand for Medicaid would shrink. It’s an argument for visibility and personal responsibility, but also a rhetorical hedge: the problem isn’t care itself, it’s the way we pay for it.