Yesterday, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a guidance letter to state Medicaid directors saying that CMS would welcome Section 1115 Waiver applications that contained work requirements. The guidance would not provide any extra money for supportive employment or services and it’s logic chain of justifying employment as a condition of receiving healthcare continually confuses correlation and causation. It is a guarantee that there will be a lot of lawyers involved once the first 1115 waiver with work requirements is approved.
Kentucky is highly likely to be the test case. Their 1332 waiver is heavy on work requirements and it is likely to be approved within the next week. Functionally it is designed to force adults off of Medicaid by either explicitly disqualifying people for not working or volunteering enough or by creating paperwork hassle barriers. At the end of the fifth demonstration year, Kentucky projects that roughly 90,000 fewer adults will be covered by Medicaid.
There is something odd in the budget justification. The Per Member Per Year (PMPY) costs of the adult population is projected to be strange for the Legacy Medicaid adult population.
Medicaid work requirements and the Kentucky 1115Post + Comments (23)