John Hood of North Carolina’s John Locke Foundation today pens important advice to conservatives who are trying to improve Medicaid, the joint federal-state health care program (ostensibly) for the poor:

Too many conservative advocates of Medicaid reform couch their advocacy in terms such as “enrolling in private health plans will remove the stigma from patients on Medicaid” and “choice is better than cutting Medicaid reimbursements to providers, which limit recipients’ access to the best doctors.” These may be effects of a reform, but they shouldn’t be thought of as goals or even as necessarily positive.

Repeat after me: Medicaid is welfare. Medicaid is welfare. Medicaid is welfare. It is a forced redistribution of resources from those who earned them to those who did not. There may be good reasons to defend Medicaid as a concept, or to imagine some kind of more-limited program to replace it, but they must recognize that Medicaid is an arm of the welfare state. As such, no one should consider it a “right” for Medicaid recipients to have access to the very same doctors, devices, and treatments as those who pay their own way.

Full disclosure: He then goes on to quote me favorably, which may be clouding my judgment.