Legal aid lawyers Kevin De Liban and Trevor Hawkins, who successfully sued to stop Arkansas’s Medicaid work requirements, recently wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times highlighting the suffering caused by Medicaid work requirements: We Saw Medicaid Work Requirements Up Close. You Don’t Want This Chaos. Some highlights from the piece below:
- “The policy caused chaos for everyone involved: people receiving Medicaid, hospitals and health clinics, pharmacies, social services organizations and state agency caseworkers.”
- “…Ninety-two percent of the targeted Medicaid recipients already work, are in school, have family caregiving responsibilities or have disabilities. When work requirements were imposed in Arkansas, they did not increase employment. In fact, there’s reason to believe that they could counterproductively hurt employment. That’s because when you take away people’s health insurance, their otherwise manageable health conditions turn into unmanageable work barriers.”
- “This kind of disastrous policy doesn’t come cheaply, either. A U.S. Government Accountability Office report estimated that administering work requirements in Arkansas alone cost over $24 million in state and federal funds for less than a year of operation. When four other states sought to implement work requirements, the report estimated the cost at $382 million. A more recent work requirement program in Georgia cost $87 million. The only way to cover these costs is to kick people off Medicaid. The game is rigged.”
June 12, 2025 – K. Kertesz