Work Requirements for Medicaid Don’t Work
“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
This month, the Trump administration took the first steps toward trying to block a federal lawsuit that’s attempting to remove Arkansas’s Medicaid work requirements. The state of Arkansas implemented its Medicaid work requirements this year resulting in thousands of people being purged from the program. Over 12,000 Arkansas residents are now without health care because of this state’s immoral decision.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration opened the door for states to compel people to work or meet other requirements in order to receive their Medicaid benefits despite multiple studies showing that Medicaid work requirements did more harm than good. Arkansas is one of five states (Indiana, Wisconsin, Kentucky, & New Hampshire) whose work requirements have been approved, with nine other states working on requirements of their own. Despite claims by many lawmakers, the majority of Medicaid recipients already work or are exempt for reasons like pregnancy or disability. This means the “savings” that states would get from implementing work requirements would actually be very minimal and would be doing more harm by placing purged recipients’ health at risk. In June, a federal judge blocked the state of Kentucky from implementing Medicaid work requirements because they would be reducing needed health care coverage with no actual benefit to the state. But by Thanksgiving, the Trump administration had reapproved work requirements for Kentucky that will be implemented in 2019.
These work requirements are stripping health care from our nation’s most vulnerable. In Arkansas, Medicaid recipients are required to either work 80 hours per month, attend school, volunteer or be actively searching for work. These requirements don’t take into account that the majority of those who don’t meet them are caring for children or family members. Others may be working but are unable to sustain the minimum number of required hours because of child care obligations, cuts to available hours, or poor health.
Arkansas also strips coverage from enrollees who fail to meet the requirements for three consecutive months, and then bans them from re-enrolling for the rest of the year, even if they resume meeting the criteria. This additional caveat is even more detrimental to those who are already struggling with poor health issues or whose jobs are contractual or seasonal. In August, only 390 of the 17,000 Arkansas residents who were obligated to meet the new work requirements qualified for enough work activity.
We cannot sit idly by and allow health care to be stripped from this nation’s most vulnerable. We need a single-payer universal health care system that does not discriminate based on race or socioeconomic status or because of pre-existing conditions. We need every state to embrace Medicaid and Medicaid expansion. The only way this will happen, however, is if we unite our voices together and demand it. That’s why the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is calling upon all Americans to make their voices heard. Change will not happen until we demand it, and we must demand that the people who are elected into these positions of power start putting the needs of the people above corporations and lobbyists.
We need your voices, and we need them now.
The Poor People’s Campaign is being led by Repairers of the Breach in partnership with national and local partners. To learn more about Repairers of the Breach and the movement to build a moral agenda, visit www.breachrepairers.org. To find out more about the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, visit www.poorpeoplescampaign.org.
