Justin Ho

She saw all of that in Arkansas in 2018 when the state passed Medicaid work requirements.

In the first six months, 18,000 people lost coverage.

the overwhelming majority of them for paperwork reasons.

Those work requirements were eventually overturned by a court, but now new ones are coming back, and not just in Arkansas, around the country.

Larry Levitt at the health policy nonprofit KFF says over the next few years, all sorts of new rules are set to phase in that will reduce how much the federal government spends on Medicaid by nearly a trillion dollars.

And the new work requirements.

All of this is likely to cause about 7.5 million people to lose their insurance, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.

And Dr. Adam Gaffney at Harvard Medical School says on top of that, Congress also put new restrictions on Affordable Care Act coverage and let those enhanced subsidies expire.

There's evidence that this is what will happen from research Gaffney just did with a few colleagues looking at what happened after several other Medicaid cuts in the past.

had just tipped into recession, which is typically when safety net programs like Medicaid catch people.

But in the 80s, that didn't really happen.

So the uninsurance rate went up.

The poverty rate went up.

And people who previously would have been eligible for Medicaid weren't because of the cuts.

And he says much like what happened in Arkansas in 2018, Tennessee's cuts led to a lot of people losing their health insurance.

Camille Rishu in Arkansas says this all leads her to believe one thing.

This is a bad policy that they're implementing.

Past experience shows most people who lose their coverage because of Medicaid work requirements are actually eligible.

They just struggle with the paperwork and red tape.

There are some ways that you can kind of mitigate harm.