Arkansas Times
By: Benjamin Hardy
On Monday, the nation’s top Medicaid official traveled to Little Rock to announce federal approval of a measure long sought by Governor Hutchinson: a work requirement for beneficiaries of Arkansas Works, the program providing health insurance to 285,000 low-income Arkansans under the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion.
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But many health care advocates are skeptical that work requirements help beneficiaries. Joan Alker, the executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University, said the Arkansas waiver was “fundamentally misguided.” “Everybody agrees that it would be great to help folks get better-paying jobs so that they can move onto private health insurance, but there’s really nothing in this proposal that’s likely to make this happen,” Alker said in a phone interview. “The federal government is not providing funding for job-training services; they’re not providing funding for child care or transportation or addressing other barriers that folks might have to getting a job or getting a better job.”
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