WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge blocked Medicaid work requirements in two states on Wednesday, dealing a blow to one of the Trump administration’s marquee efforts to push the poor toward self-sufficiency.
U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg in Washington issued two decisions finding that Medicaid work requirements for low-income people in Arkansas and Kentucky pose numerous obstacles to getting health care that haven’t been adequately resolved by federal and state officials.
He sent the federal Health and Human Services Department back to the drawing board.
Work requirements are already in effect in Arkansas, but Kentucky’s program has been on hold because of lawsuits. Both states want “able-bodied” adults who get health insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion to work, study, volunteer or participate in “community engagement” activities.
But advocates for the poor say that Medicaid is a health care program and that work requirements have no place in it. Boasberg did not resolve that core issue.
Instead, he wrote that HHS approval of the Arkansas requirement was “arbitrary and capricious because it did not address …whether and how the project would implicate the ‘core’ objective of Medicaid: the provision of medical coverage to the needy.”
He used similar language in his ruling on Kentucky.
Nationally, some 12 million people are covered by the Medicaid expansion, accepted now by more than 30 states. Officials in GOP-led states have argued that work requirements and other measures such as modest premiums are needed to ensure political acceptance for the expansion.
The Trump administration early on encouraged states to apply for Medicaid waivers that would allow work requirements.
Eight states have had their requests approved, though not all have put their programs in place, according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. Requests from seven others are pending. In one of those states, Virginia, a work requirement was key to getting the legislature to approve Medicaid expansion.
I really hope this sticks. Cutting off heath benefits to sick people if they are not working - and like KY doing so via complex ways that confuse people - is directly contrary to the stutory purposes and intent of the program. This change must come from congress, yet even when the pubs were in charge they could not get it through.
Purported “conservatives” complained about the administrative state, and acts not approved by congress, well this is a clear effort to change the law, w/o passing a law. The judge should be upheld, but we will have to see with so many republican partisan judges at this point on the court of appeal
Donie should just put them to work building Trumpian’s Wall.
If they expire on the job, less to worry about, and a definite motivator to the others.
Huzzah for AP’s nonsense framing of the administration’s malfeasance as a positive outcome for the poor…
That caught my eye as well. Although, at least this time, the AP didn’t give a Republican PR flack the last word …
“Advocates for the poor say Medicaid is a health care program, and work requirements have no place.”
This seems like a circle firing squad. The state who administer Medicaid don’t want anyone to get something for free so they get a waiver from HHS to add “work requirement” so clients aren’t getting something for free. Then the state devises the most Byzantine system of reporting their “work hours”. Throwing in they can only be reported online, during certain hours, in a state with piss poor internet service, let alone advertising this change, which all results in the state’s Medicaid rolls to shrink an no new money to go to community health centers that would be expected to pick up the care for those that were tossed from the rolls.
god help the poor