Think a Work Requirement Is Needed for Medicaid? Think Again

But Conservatives Just Talk – They Don't Think

Kentucky has become the first state to try and impose work requirements for people receiving Medicaid benefits. See, in Conservative World the welfare class is just a bunch of able bodied men and women who choose to sit around and live off the welfare state, collect benefits like Medicaid and just laugh at the rest of the hard working world. Turns out this is not true.

When one looks at the data, data being to conservatives like garlic to a werewolf, the story is different, that is, real. Aaron Carroll of the excellent forum The Incidental Economist has reality.

A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis from spring of 2017 found that almost 80% of adults in Medicaid are from working families. Almost 60% are working themselves, and this is without any work requirements at all. Unfortunately, many in the United States, even if employed, have wages so low that they still qualify for Medicaid because they earn less than 138% of the poverty line. That is, of course, if those states accepted the Medicaid expansion. In states that didn’t, many adults who work can’t afford insurance.

Disability and Illness

Of those who don’t work, about 35% are unable to work because of disability or illness. Another 28% are taking care of other members of their families in lieu of jobs. Of those that remain, 18% are students, 8% are looking for work but can’t find it, and 8% are retired. That leaves about 3% of the nonworking adult Medicaid population who we could, possibly, define as “able-bodied” yet choosing not to work.

Not that this will make any difference to the ideologists. Their beliefs are solid despite the truth.