The Trump admin policy was announced with a political flush..
It was only put into effect in one state….
In practice, the work requirements were barely enacted. Only one state — Arkansas — actually started such a program. Other state plans were either quickly halted by the courts, or placed on pause as state officials waited for litigation to play out. In Arkansas, about 18,000 adults lost health coverage because of their failure to document work hours, before a judge stopped the state from continuing the program. Evidence there suggested that few affected people knew the work requirement existed, and many who did struggled to complete the necessary paperwork.
“Arkansas made a good-faith effort to tell people about the program; they sent out thousands of emails and set up a call center,” said Ian Hill, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, who has conducted focus groups with Medicaid enrollees affected by work requirements. “The complex message just didn’t get through to people, so they didn’t know what they were subject to.”
In the letters to the states, the agency noted that the idea of conditioning health insurance on work was particularly inappropriate during the Covid-19 pandemic, when many poor Americans have gotten sick and needed health care, and when waves of layoffs have left millions unemployed.
“C.M.S. has serious concerns about testing policies that create a risk of a substantial loss of health care coverage in the near term,” the letters say….