Why does Medicaid and other low income benefits have a hard cut off on a specific income rather than role off proportionally as an individual makes more in the US?

Question

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In: Economics

Answer 1

Government operates on two general ideas

1: A calculator: You put in x money through your life, you are now entitled to y each month

or 2: ‘one size fits all’. Cost of living changes substantially even within relatively short distances and it would be a bureaucratic nightmare to constantly have to reassess this general plot against the surrounding ones then determining overall how much of the pie they should be entitled to. You’d constantly have people arguing that ‘this side of the street’ is worse off than that side based on little things like it being a one way street so they should receive 3% more because the taxi costs that much more to take them to the grocery store. But that of course can change as well because what if there is a new grocery store on this side of town that saves 5% vs the previous amount

Essentially you would end up with endless litigation/public hearings over every single change. ‘Well HE got a raise, now he makes 12.25 instead of 12.20″ which would be insanely costly to taxpayers to have to have an army of accountants and lawyers whose entire job is to argue why someone shouldn’t be entitled to another 14 dollars a month. Add in that government offices are already incredibly understaffed means it is more likely that other departments would lose staff to accommodate this waste of money one broadly making everything even less efficient