Arkansas: 12,000 People Dropped From Medicaid Due To New Work Requirements
US News, Nov. 20, "Arkansas Works Program Drops 12,000 From Medicaid." The work requirements for Medicaid coverage has torpedoed health coverage for thousands of Arkansans.
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Susan Ferguson, a physician in the tattered village of Lincoln, Arkansas, describes the expansion of Medicaid in her state in 2015 as "the best thing that ever happened here." Patients she had never seen, or hadn't seen in years, appeared in her clinic to receive checkups and seek treatment for lingering illnesses after the state implemented its version of the Affordable Care Act.
For some, lack of insurance meant "the chest pain they'd been ignoring for five years required open-heart surgery when they could have walked away with a stent." Others finally received prescriptions for psychiatric, pulmonary and autoimmune disorders they previously couldn't afford. Now, patients across the state are disappearing again.
In June, with encouragement and approval from the Trump administration, Arkansas was the first state in the country to impose a work requirement on Medicaid. Exemptions were granted for those deemed ill, caring for dependents or currently employed. Everyone else had to report that they were working or engaged in another approved activity, at least 80 hours per month.
The result: Since September, about 1,500 Arkansans reported working enough hours to keep Medicaid – while more than 12,200 failed to report and lost their insurance. And 6,000 Medicaid recipients are at risk of losing their insurance in December.
Critics are blasting the state for outreach measures that they say failed to inform Medicaid recipients of the new rules, as well as for requiring poor Arkansans to use a web portal for the program, noting the state that has low levels of internet literacy and access. The sudden health-care crisis in Arkansas has rung alarms in Washington, D.C., where the Department of U.S. Health and Human Services has already granted permission for similar programs to three other states. Nine more applications are pending. On Nov. 8, an advisory commission on Medicaid called on HHS Secretary Alex Azar to force "a pause in disenrollments" in Arkansas.
The commission described the low level of reporting as "a strong warning signal" that the program in Arkansas is not working for many poor residents on Medicaid – "with high stakes for beneficiaries who fail." The program, called Arkansas Works, is an outgrowth of a Republican initiative to nullify Obamacare's extension of the insurance program to healthy adults. Policy experts say that Arkansas is actually punishing, intentionally or not, a slice of the population that is already distressed – folks with little education, poor health, with limited access to and understanding of the internet, and who often can't afford transportation to work. -MORE..
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2018-11-20/medicaid-work-requirements-in-arkansas-drop-thousands-from-health-program
*News reports note another issue that is interfering: the Arkansas state website that Medicaid recipients must to use to report their work hours online, is disabled between 9pm and 7am daily for scheduled maintenance.
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