Trump's new Medicaid work requirements are here
It's just cruelty.
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Medicaid was always meant for people who can't work, not people who won't, so if that's the takeaway from the policy, the excerpt did the rest of the thinking for us.
forcing people to work 40 hours a week on $7.25 an hour while they're also raising kids alone is the actual policy here, not some abstract moral debate about whether work requirements exist.
Mother Jones calls basic accountability "cruelty." Working adults contributing to a program they use is literally how Social Security has operated for decades. The people who scream loudest about this are always the ones who've never had to worry about losing a job. Medicaid was designed as a safety net not a permanent lifestyle and if you're physically able to work you should work. Pretty wild that requiring effort is now considered a human rights violation by the left.
Work requirements literally push people OFF Medicaid, which is the whole point, and the data from every state that's tried this shows it doesn't get people into jobs faster, it just strips coverage from folks who ARE working but can't navigate the bureaucracy or hit arbitrary deadlines.
Work requirements aren't new and aren't inherently cruel; the implementation details matter enormously. The key variables are exemption categories, documentation burden, and whether the state actually has infrastructure to process compliance without dropping eligible people through administrative churn. Arkansas tried this in 2018 and 18,000 people lost coverage, mostly because of paperwork failures, not because they weren't working. The policy question is whether the design is built to verify work or built to reduce rolls through bureaucratic attrition.
Arkansas ran this exact experiment from 2018 to 2019. About 18,000 people lost coverage. A subsequent study found the majority of those people were ALREADY meeting the work requirement or were exempt; they lost coverage because the reporting portal was confusing or they didn't know the requirement existed. Coverage loss didn't track with non-compliance. It tracked with administrative burden. The courts struck it down partly because CMS couldn't demonstrate it advanced Medicaid's core objectives. If the new rollout uses the same kind of reporting infrastructure, the outcome is going to look similar regardless of the stated intent, because that's what the evidence from the last attempt actually showed.
so we're just going to pretend the people on medicaid dont already work two jobs and still can't afford rent? got it.
The CMS rule requires 80 hours per month of "community engagement" and the actual documentation lists exemptions so narrowly that the Urban Institute modeled 5.2 million people losing coverage who already meet employment thresholds, because the paperwork burden alone creates de facto disenrollment. Arkansas tried this in 2018 and 18,000 people lost coverage before a federal judge blocked it, and the GAO found the vast majority of those 18,000 WERE employed but couldn't navigate the monthly reporting portal. The work requirement isn't a policy for getting people into work, it's administrative disenrollment with extra steps. The target population is people working inconsistent hours in gig or seasonal jobs, which is exactly the demographic the rule claims it's trying to help.