Trump Administration Cancels Medicaid For 18,000 Arkansans Who Did Not Report Their Jobs Through The Correct Website, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Low-Income Adults Were Receiving Health Coverage Without First Demonstrating Reliable Internet Access

The Filing

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. In what administration officials have long hailed as a decisive blow against the scourge of insured poverty, the Trump administration's Medicaid work requirement program had, by early 2019, successfully removed roughly 18,000 low-income Arkansans from their health coverage, the bulk of them for failing to report their employment through a state website.

The policy, approved by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma, required Medicaid recipients between the ages of 19 and 49 to log 80 hours of work or qualifying activity each month, a figure they were initially permitted to submit only through an online portal. Officials noted that the requirement worked exactly as intended, terminating coverage for thousands of residents, a substantial share of whom were in fact employed but had not navigated the reporting system correctly, lacked reliable internet access, or were unaware the requirement existed at all.

"This is about restoring the dignity of work," said one senior official, who explained that the program drew a long-overdue distinction between Americans who deserve health care and Americans who deserve health care but did not check the website. The official added that the administration remained committed to the principle that no able-bodied adult should receive medical treatment without first completing a monthly data-entry task.

Independent researchers later confirmed the program's efficiency. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the requirement produced no measurable increase in employment, a result the administration characterized as proof that coverage could be stripped cleanly, without the program becoming entangled in the unrelated goal of helping anyone find a job.

On March 27, 2019, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg vacated the Arkansas approval, along with a similar one in Kentucky, ruling that the Department of Health and Human Services had neglected to consider whether the policy would advance Medicaid's actual purpose of furnishing medical coverage. Administration officials expressed disappointment that the court had introduced the question of coverage into a coverage program.

At press time, CMS was reviewing whether the 80-hour requirement could be preserved by simply making the reporting website slightly harder to find.

Who Benefits

§Donald Trump, who gained a welfare-reform talking point and the ability to tell supporters that his administration was attaching the discipline of work to a program for the poor.
§Seema Verma, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, whose signature initiative this was, and whose national profile rose as the recognized architect of Medicaid work requirements.
§The Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative advocacy group that drafted and promoted model work-requirement policy for years and watched its agenda enacted at the federal level.
§State officials seeking Medicaid savings, who could report reduced enrollment figures without the inconvenience of those residents having found other coverage.
§Private contractors hired to build the online reporting portals, who were paid to construct the very systems whose complexity removed thousands of enrollees from the rolls.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment