Average Medicaid expenditures (per year) for persons with disabilities (age 0-64) was $19.7k in 2016[0]. It's probably higher by now. So by cutting Medicaid and replacing it with a flat $15k/year you're reducing benefits to persons with disabilities, on average, by almost $5k/year. Since that's an average, I'm sure there are some who will see much larger cuts and quite a few who will find themselves unable to afford necessary treatments or other costs relating to their disability.
That's just Medicaid; it gets worse when you consider all the other programs being cut.
Even allowing for realistic reductions in bureaucratic overhead, you can't just cut narrowly targeted programs and spread the same amount of money evenly across the entire population without significantly reducing the money available, on average, to the original beneficiaries.
> The sensible move would be to keep disability, etc. as a form of insurance where costs are spread across the populace.
And now you're back where you started—you haven't eliminated these need-based programs at all, or reduced the bureaucracy. You've just added the UBI as an extra expense.
That's just Medicaid; it gets worse when you consider all the other programs being cut.
Even allowing for realistic reductions in bureaucratic overhead, you can't just cut narrowly targeted programs and spread the same amount of money evenly across the entire population without significantly reducing the money available, on average, to the original beneficiaries.
[0] https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/medicaid-facts-and-...