美国国家公共电台 NPR It's Not Clear How Many People Could Actually Work To Get Medicaid

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Republican House leaders are making last-minute changes to their health care proposal in a bid to woo more conservatives ahead of a vote scheduled for Thursday. One of those changes would let states impose work requirements on some Medicaid recipients 1. A handful of states asked for that authority from the Obama administration but were denied. Here's Arkansas Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ASA HUTCHINSON: You're talking about healthy individuals that are capable of working that might need training, that might need opportunities. And we want to be able to have that to be a part of the Medicaid expansion program.

CORNISH: For more on this idea of requiring Medicaid recipients to work, we're joined by Leighton Ku. He's a professor of health policy at George Washington University. Welcome to the program.

LEIGHTON KU: Thank you very much.

CORNISH: We heard the Arkansas governor there talking about this concept. What do you think is the overall goal? What are people expecting to happen if they add a provision like this?

KU: I think that they believe that millions of people will no longer be enrolled 2 on Medicaid and that those are people who they feel are not meeting their social obligation to try to work. I think people think that it might help more people work. That remains 3 to be seen.

And I guess that's a tradeoff. If some people - some additional people work because of this requirement, how do we decide to trade that off against the millions who might lose their health insurance because they are unable to find meaningful work?

CORNISH: So you've studied the population of people who enrolled in Medicaid under the expansion under the Affordable 4 Care Act. So what does the data tell you? How many people out there are able-bodied and, like, not looking for work or not in school or not pregnant?

KU: So when we looked at the people who were in the expansion population, about half of them were disabled or had serious health problems. Of the other half of the group, the great majority were already working or looking for work or in school. So there is a portion, about 13 percent or so, of these adults who might be considered able-bodied but not working right now. And of those, the great majority said the reason they weren't working was because they were taking care of family members.

So there are some - and probably if you look across the nation it could be millions of individuals - who are receiving Medicaid benefits at the moment but who would be potentially required to work under the new rules that Congress is considering.

CORNISH: Now, proponents 5 of this idea said it would be like the work requirement for some recipients of food stamps that was part of the welfare overhaul 6 in the '90s. What do you make of that comparison?

KU: Well, there - there are some work requirements that already exist in the food stamp program now called SNAP. But that makes a little more sense in the context in which you think if people work, they will earn income and that can help make themselves economically self-sufficient.

In the context of Medicaid, that makes less sense because only about a quarter of the jobs that are available to people who were in the Medicaid sort of range offer health insurance to their workers. It's not as though work requirements get them to the point where they're going to be able to be self-sufficient with respect to health insurance coverage 7.

The other thing where I would disagree somewhat with Governor Hutchinson is he says this is creating opportunity for people. People already have the opportunity to seek work, to get job training. This will actually disallow 8 some of them who are trying to pursue other opportunities. So, for example, if someone is going to college and trying to get training so they can have a meaningful job over time, guess what? That doesn't count as meeting the work requirements under these policies.

CORNISH: Leighton Ku is director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University. Thank you for speaking with us.

KU: It was nice to be here.