Campaign Action
Three states—Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan—have applied for waivers with the Trump administration to impose work requirements on their Medicaid population. That's bad. What's worse is that these three states have all engineered their waivers to exempt majority white areas from the requirements. Here's what's going on in Ohio, where the waiver is now pending with HHS.
John Corlett, Ohio’s former Medicaid director and the president of Cleveland’s Center for Community Solutions, studied the 26 counties that qualify for an exemption from the proposed Medicaid work requirements and found they are, on average, 94 percent white. Meanwhile, his research found, "most of these non-exempted Ohio communities have either majority or significant African-American populations."
These waivers are ripe for lawsuits as two health law experts Nicholas Bagley and Eli Savit argue: "Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits recipients of federal funds—including state Medicaid programs—from employing 'methods of administration that appear neutral but have a discriminatory effect on individuals because of their race.'" But that means waiting out the legal process.
Here's something you can do immediately: tell the Trump administration that exempting white counties from Medicaid work requirements while requiring them from primarily black counties is wrong. Until Friday, HHS is taking public comment on the waiver. You can weigh in in opposition to it simply by registering your email address with Medicaid.gov.
Resist. (H/T to Emma Sandoe for spearheading this fight.)