Appeals panel expresses skepticism about Medicaid work requirements
Source: Washington Post
Federal appeals court judges sounded dubious on Friday about requirements the Trump administration has allowed states to impose that compel some poor people to get jobs in exchange for Medicaid. During oral arguments in a pair of cases involving work requirements in Kentucky and Arkansas — with high stakes for other states — all three members of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit repeatedly said that senior Trump health officials had neglected to consider people who would lose health insurance under the new work rules.
Noting that state Medicaid experiments must fulfill the basic purposes of the program, Judge Harry T. Edwards told a Justice Department attorney, “You are failing to address the critical statutory objective” of providing vulnerable residents with health coverage. The attorney, Alisa Klein, of Justice’s civil division, said the administration believes that requiring low-income people to work, or prepare for jobs, can improve their health and ultimately help them get private health plans, freeing up money that states could use for additional Medicaid benefits. “The other things you say may be laudable goals, but to say they outweigh the principal goal [of Medicaid] seems a bit strange,” said Judge David B. Sentelle, nominated by President Ronald Reagan and the only Republican appointee on the panel.
The judges also were dismissive of the administration’s argument that work requirements for Medicaid merely extend an idea embedded for two decades in the nation’s main welfare and food assistance programs. Sentelle said the analogies “are not comparable at all,” because Congress specifically wrote that financial self-sufficiency is a goal of the other two programs but has never included that in Medicaid law.
The hearing turned on controversy over the Trump administration’s promotion of a fundamental redesign of Medicaid, which began as a central piece of Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s-era anti-poverty Great Society, and is today the country’s largest public insurance program. Friday’s hearing come seven months after a federal district judge placed a major roadblock in the Trump administration’s efforts to let states compel poor people on Medicaid to work in exchange for health insurance.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/appeals-panel-expresses-skepticism-about-medicaid-work-requirements/2019/10/11/a8357c4e-eb8a-11e9-9c6d-436a0df4f31d_story.html
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