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Medicaid beneficiaries will start working in droves. Few sick Americans will lose coverage. The government will generate huge savings.
This is how the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services expects new Medicaid work requirements to play out. But those assumptions, outlined in a rule this summer that created implementation guidelines for states, are fundamentally defective, according to a new analysis from nonpartisan think tank the Brookings Institution.
The Trump administration’s analysis of the rule’s impact on beneficiaries and taxpayers isn’t based on actual data, according to the report. Instead, it relies on hypotheticals meant to make the rule look like it’ll benefit Medicaid beneficiaries and the federal government, with only a minor tradeoff on enrollment losses — and ignores evidence that the rule could do more harm than good.
CMS made “complete random assumptions. They didn’t provide any — zero — justification for their assumptions,” Sherry Glied, a senior fellow with Brookings’ Center on Health Policy and an author of the report, said in an interview.
