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Health Officials are also preparing to withdraw the 2018 letter from the Trump administration that first announced the job requirements policy and to cancel a separate letter from earlier this year aimed at making it harder for the new Biden administration to quickly reverse the policy.
“CMS has serious concerns that this is not the right time to test policies that risk a substantial loss of health care coverage or short-term benefits,” according to a draft Department of Health Deployment Plan. health titled “Medicaid Work Requirement Rescission.
President Joe Biden, who has targeted other Trump health policies as he seeks to lean on Obamacare, has long signaled his intention to unravel Medicaid’s work demands. Democrats have criticized the rules as being illegal and intended to kick people off the program’s lists.
Trump Medicaid Chief Seema Verma, who criticized Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid to poor adults and elaborated on the requirements, argued that they would encourage healthy people to work and help maintain the financial viability of state Medicaid programs.
Biden last month issued an executive order ordering his health department to identify policies that fail to “protect and strengthen Medicaid.” But the draft deployment plan obtained by POLITICO indicates that the coronavirus pandemic is the main reason for the retreat of work rules, arguing that the crisis has “considerably increased the risk” of the policy leading to an “unintentional loss of coverage” .
In addition, uncertainty regarding the lingering health consequences of COVID infections further exacerbates the harms of loss of coverage or lack of access to coverage for Medicaid beneficiaries, ”the plan states.
The decision also comes as the Supreme Court is due to review the validity of the labor rules on March 29. Lower courts have so far blocked attempts to institute the labor rules, leading most states to demand that their application be stopped. Biden’s plan to remove the labor rules could render the Supreme Court case moot.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Ten GOP-led states that requested the Trump administration’s permission for the labor rules have been approved or “considered approved,” according to the draft deployment plan. Several other states had requested permission for the work rules but were not approved before Trump left office.
The working rules were approved through Medicaid waivers, which allow states to test health coverage ideas. A new administration can usually reverse waivers that it says do not support Medicaid goals, although states can protest the move.
In the last few weeks of the Trump administration, Verma called on states to sign contracts that would establish a lengthy process for resolving job demands and other conservative changes to their Medicaid programs. Medicaid experts questioned whether these contracts were legally enforceable.
The health department on Friday also plans to clean up some references to the work requirements program and related documents on the government’s Medicaid website.
Instead, it will display a link to an HHS document titled “Medicaid Demonstrations and Impacts on Health Coverage: A Review of the Evidence.” The document, among other topics, will address “the impact of work requirements on Medicaid’s commitment to Americans in need,” the draft deployment plan says.
Only one state, Arkansas, has fully implemented Medicaid’s labor rules. About 18,000 people lost Medicaid coverage in 2018 in the few months the requirements were in place, before a judge blocked them.
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