VoxCare Email Newsletter

By: Dylan Scott

The CMS decision to reject Kansas’s waiver is a very big deal: Lifetime limits have not gotten the same amount of attention as work requirements, but they would have signaled an equally important shift in Medicaid, away from an entitlement for all eligible Americans toward a shrinking program actively culling people from the rolls. Even if work requirements are allowed, it matters that the administration is not going to let states to kick people off Medicaid simply because they have been on the program for a long time. “I do think it is significant that CMS has decided to say no to one of the pending requests that cut people off of Medicaid,” Joan Alker, executive director at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, told me.