Trump poised to take action on Medicaid work requirements
The Trump administration is preparing to release guidelines soon for requiring Medicaid recipients to work, according to sources familiar with the plans, a major shift in the 50-year-old program.
The guidelines will set the conditions for allowing states to add work requirements to their Medicaid programs for the first time, putting a conservative twist on the health insurance program for the poor.
Democrats are gearing up for a fight, likely including lawsuits, arguing the administration is trying to undermine ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion on its own after Congress failed to repeal the health-care law.
The changes represent the vision of Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), who has long worked on conservative Medicaid changes.
In a speech in November hinting at the coming changes, Verma criticized ObamaCare for expanding Medicaid to “able-bodied” adults and said that group of people should be expected to work.
“Believing that community engagement requirements do not support or promote the objectives of Medicaid is a tragic example of the soft bigotry of low expectations consistently espoused by the prior administration,” Verma said. “Those days are over.”
The work requirements would only take effect if a state chose to pursue them and applied for a waiver from the federal government. The Obama administration always rejected state applications that included work requirements, but the new guidelines from the Trump administration would set conditions where those applications would be approved for the first time.
http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/367514-trump-poised-to-take-action-on-medicaid-work-requirements
= new reply since forum marked as read
