Arkansas Times
The Trump administration has approved a waiver to federal Medicaid rules that will allow Arkansas to impose a work requirement on 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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The new work requirement will require beneficiaries to regularly document their status with the Department of Human Services; those out of compliance for three months will not be eligible to rejoin the program until the following year. Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University, told the Arkansas Nonprofit News Network that 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. 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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