A Federal Judge Just Blocked Kentucky’s Plans To Cut Medicaid

The state can’t add work requirements to the insurance program.

A Florida woman goes in for a medical exam. Skip O'Rourke/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMApress.com

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

On Friday afternoon, a federal judge put a halt to Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin’s (R) plan to impose work requirements for Medicaid recipients. The ruling comes in response to a lawsuit brought by 15 Kentucky residents enrolled in Medicaid who contested the work requirement, claiming it would “relegate them to second-class status within Medicaid.”

Kentucky’s experiment was just the first of a growing number of states eager to cut Medicaid for eligible residents under the Trump administration by adding work requirements.  Earlier this year, Kentucky and Indiana both received waivers from the Trump administration for Medicaid work requirements, requiring at least 80 and 20 hours of work a month respectively. Under the Obama administration, the Department of Health and Human Services had not allowed Republican states to add work requirements.

In his opinion on the case, Judge James E. Boasberg, an Obama nominee, explained that, “Such review reveals that the [HHS] Secretary never adequately considered whether Kentucky HEALTH would in fact help the state furnish medical assistance to its citizens, a central objective of Medicaid. This signal omission renders his determination arbitrary and capricious.” Boasberg also stated that the new laws “primarily (though not exclusively)” targeted citizens to whom benefits were extended to under the Affordable Care Act.

Despite the ruling, Kentuckians aren’t out of the clear yet.  In a January executive order, Bevin wrote that if any component of the work requirement waiver is blocked, state officials had six months to end the Medicaid expansion program, a provision of Obamacare that allows anyone up to 138 percent of the poverty line to gain insurance through Medicaid. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, enrollment in Medicaid more than doubled in Kentucky after the ACA, and rolling back expanded coverage could leave more than 600,000 residents without insurance.

While Friday’s ruling does not directly challenge a January decision by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)  to allow states to impose work requirements, it does provide a precedent for legal challenges in other states. In June, the governors of both Virginia and Michigan signed legislation to add work requirements to their state’s Medicaid programs, but neither have submitted their proposal to CMS. 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate