A Study Of The Relationship Between The Citizen's Body And The Governance In Medicaid

Medicaid is a social assistance program aiming to help the poor people to solve their health problems. The policy pays its attention to the condition of the recipients'bodies, the individuals are pulled into the government's policy process because of their requirement of health. So the policy process is also a process of establishing a relationship between the government and the individual. This study tries to analyze the relationship through the body and politics perspective, and explain what the concrete governmentality is through which the government makes the relationship come into being and illustrate theoretically the influence of the Medicaid in constructing the state-citizen relationship when the policy is carried out.The relationship between the recipients and the government is influenced by those two factors. The government manages the recipients'bodies through Medicaid policy, and governs the society through the managing of the bodies. When the individual applies and accepts the assistance, not his (her) body but his (her) social net could be gazed and controlled by the state. The government uses the Medicaid policy to manage the recipients'and their families'activities, tries to solve the social problems and stabilize the people's mood through it. Through the policy process and symbolizing the poor people's body, it exhibit its power and responsibility for the civilians, and it enforces the validity from the society. And the recipients gained benefit from the policy because their health condition may be improved and they can get the necessary medical resources from the system of Medicaid. And because of the influence of traditional culture and the modern market value, the recipients regard Medicaid as the government's gift, they treat the government's assistant as the private gift.The penman finds that the gift relationship between the citizen and the state has been formed in the Medicaid policy process, but this relationship is not the same as its meaning in anthropologists'works, and also different with the altruism which is the meaning of the phrase in Titmuss'work, it is a reciprocal political relationship, and is a form of the government's political practice. But it can harm the reciprocal effect when degree of the gift relation is excess, because it can depress the recipients'idea of rights, and this condition makes the recipients stay home and wait for the government's assistance, then the result is that they can't go out of the poverty trap and can't get close to the medical resource easily. So if we want to help them out, we have to enforce their awareness of rights. Meanwhile, the government should reform and improve the medical system, redistribute the medical resource equally, and mend the Medicaid policy by increasing the level of assistant and expending the coverage and choosing a suitable mode. At the same time, the individual should aware of their rights and seek the government's help actively. For this purpose, it should be helpful to use the professional social workers.