Having a job gives individuals purpose and dignity.
We should promote policies lifting people out of poverty.
In the 1990s, we passed welfare reform with a Republican congress and a Democrat president.
The results: welfare rolls went down, poverty rates decreased [and] employment and earnings increased.
Establishing work requirements in Medicaid for able-bodied adults, with reasonable exemptions – then from the previous precedent of welfare reform – that all makes common sense yet today.
States like Iowa are already leading the way in establishing work requirements for able-bodied adults in Medicaid.
Iowa’s Governor Reynolds has said, “If you are an able-bodied adult who can work, you should work.”
We’re doing the same thing at a national level.
Work requirements under the One Big Beautiful Bill only apply to able-bodied adults between the ages of 19 and 64.
Individuals will have to complete a minimum of 80 hours of work a month, or about 20 hours a week, of qualifying community engagement activities, like working, job training, going to school, volunteering or a combination of all these.
We have reasonable exemptions for:
Veterans with [a] disability rated as total.
Individuals who are medically frail or otherwise have special medical needs.
Individuals who are blind, have [a] substance abuse disorder, a disabling mental disorder, a physical or intellectual disability that significantly impairs their ability to perform one or more activities of daily living or a serious, complex medical condition.
We also have exemptions for:
Parents, guardians and caretaker relatives of children aged 14 or under or disabled individuals.
Foster care youth through the age of 26.
We give “good cause” exemptions for short-term hardships like hospitalizations or for an individual receiving psychiatric care.
Individuals impacted by a natural disaster, living in high-unemployment areas or having to travel outside of their community for an extended period of time to receive medical service would also be exempted.
Now, states will obviously be required to establish streamlined process[es] and use reliable data, like payroll data, to avoid individuals submitting their own documentations.
There will also be significant outreach and education to those who will be required to work.
Labor force participation data for prime-age men, 25 to 54, indicates that between 1950 to 1970, less than one in 30 were out of the labor force.
Now, maybe it shouldn’t be surprising [that] since then, participation declined steadily so that one in 30 figure is now one in 10.
This represents nearly seven million prime-age men absent from the workforce.
On top of this, recent research found that non-working Medicaid recipients spend six hours a day on socializing, relaxing, TV and video games.
They spend 125 hours during a 30-day month watching TV and video games alone.
That is more than 50 percent higher than the 80 hours they would be required to work in a month.
Common sense Medicaid work requirements for able-bodied adults take the same approach as welfare reform did in the 1990s: move people from welfare to work and self-sufficiency.
The contrary [of] being on government programs is the life of poverty, and if you want to get out of poverty, you’ve got to be in the world of work – and that’s what we’re trying to accomplish through this legislation, just like we do work requirements for every other government program.
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