More than 1.2 million Californians at risk of losing Medicaid coverage: These would be the new requirements
Congress is pushing ahead with a proposal to require recipients to report work hours to keep Medicaid coverage. This is what it could mean...
A new piece of legislation passed in the House of Representatives promises to add new requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries, potentially cutting millions of Americans from the program.
The new requirements would require adults under 65 and without children or a disability to submit to new work reporting rules. In California it’s thought that around a third of current recipients could lose their healthcare coverage as a result.
An analysis from research group Urban Institute projects that between 1.2 and 1.4 million California residents could lose their Medicaid coverage as a result.
The new requirements would require those affected to prove that they had completed at least 80 hours of work, voluntarily work or education in the previous month. The New York Times reports that states could choose to expand that requirement, demanding that recipients work for up to a year before they can receive Medicaid support.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has praised the requirements for adding a “moral component” in the new “big, beautiful bill” proposed by President Trump.
“If you are able to work and you refuse to do so, you are defrauding the system,”Johnson said. “You’re cheating the system. And no one in the country believes that that’s right. So there’s a moral component to what we’re doing. And when you make young men work, it’s good for them, it’s good for their dignity, it’s good for their self-worth, and it’s good for the community that they live in.”
But while the Republicans have painted it as a moral issue, other have claimed that it is a cut to government spending. Trump is eager to bring in another raft of sweeping tax cuts and needs to manufacture more room in the federal budget to do so.
“You might say you’re combating waste, fraud and abuse,” said Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “[But] the way you’re going to save money is by people inadvertently or accidentally losing their coverage. The program saves money through mistakes. And that’s not a good way to run social insurance or to run policy.”
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