To no one’s surprise, a new rumor started on Facebook. It did not take long for the status that read “Kentucky just passed a great law. To be eligible for food stamps, Medicaid, or cash assistance for your children or yourself, you have to pass a DRUG test. Now every other state should do the same! If you agree re-post.” to flood my Facebook home page. After I did some investigation (mainly just looked at snopes.com) I found that no such law had passed, but this law has been proposed to the Kentucky state legislature’s House of Representatives. The proposed bill states that once a year anyone who is eligible and applies for government living assistance will have a drug test once a year. After I read about this bill I wondered why this has not passed and why the state of Texas has not thought of this.
I think that Medicaid is a great thing. I am not on insurance and there is no way I could pay the bills if something happened to me or my children. I have been on pregnancy Medicaid with two of my pregnancies. When you are on Medicaid you are asked if you have or do use illegal drugs, and you talk to a social worker, but they just mark down what you say without testing you. The drug test would be helpful in this situation, not only as reliable source of the situation that this child will be brought into, but also this can show doctors the proper treatments to give to these pregnant women.
The purpose of cash assistance is to help people in desperate situations get back on their feet. While on the cash assistant programs they require that each person applies for jobs on a regular basis. Well if they did a drug test before people are accepted for the cash assistance the program would know whether they would even be hired, since most jobs require a drug test.
I think that it would be great if it was true if the rumors were true, and if at least one state would start doing drug tests to be allowed to even apply for government assistance. Many of these government assistance programs work along side of Child Protection Services; you would think that these programs would want to know the situation of the home in more detail than what the parents write on the application. I have nothing against people getting on government assistance and I understand that people run into hard times, but it bothers me that people take advantage of these services. Texas really needs to do something different when it comes to applying for these services and I think a drug test would be a great new law.