The Trump administration plans to do something no other administration has done before — allow states to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients.
In the coming months, the Trump administration could approve waivers allowing eight states to implement the work requirements: Arkansas, Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, Utah and Wisconsin. All but three of the states accepted ObamaCare’s expansion of Medicaid to cover more low-income adults.
The Obama administration rejected similar waiver requests, but “those days are over,” according to Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Verma has said that arguments against the work requirements are “a tragic example of the soft bigotry of low expectations consistently espoused by the prior administration.”