Medicaid work requirements: a really bad idea for increasing employment

In January of 2018 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that it would be granting waivers to states to impose either work or community engagement requirements on non-disabled, working-age Medicaid beneficiaries, based on the idea that such requirements would ‘promote better mental, physical, and emotional health’ and help families ‘rise out of poverty and attain independence'.1 To date, four states have approved waivers (Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky and New Hampshire) and seven states have pending waivers with CMS.2 These waivers typically require that individuals work anywhere from 20 to 30 hours per week or engage in some specified activity to maintain eligibility for Medicaid benefits, with exceptions made, in some cases, for the elderly, pregnant women, primary caregivers, students and those with substance-abuse disorders or serious physical illness. There are good reasons to fear that these waivers will not improve health or foster economic self-sufficiency among current Medicaid beneficiaries as CMS suggest but instead will lead to worse health outcomes and less economic security among individuals who lose access to healthcare as a consequence of these waivers. These concerns were one reason why implementation of the KY waiver was halted. In the case of Stewart v. Azar , the court found that in the approval of the waiver the Secretary of Health and Human Services failed to consider the waiver’s impact on providing affordable health coverage to the low-income populations identified by Congress …