[[link removed]]

NO, THERE ISN’T AN EPIDEMIC OF WORKLESS MEDICAID RECIPIENTS  
[[link removed]]


 

Matt Bruenig
May 16, 2025
Jacobin
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Trump administration officials including RFK Jr want to add work
requirements to Medicaid, arguing that there is a major scourge of
able-bodied recipients refusing to get jobs. Their case dramatically
overstates how many people in this group are not _

Robert F. Kennedy Jr speaks alongside President Donald Trump during a
press conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on May 12,
2025, in Washington, DC. , Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

 

The _New York Times_ recently ran an opinion piece
[[link removed]]
from Robert F. Kennedy Jr and three other Trump administration
officials in which they argue in favor of adding work requirements to
Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income Americans.

At one point in the piece, they write that:

A recent analysis
[[link removed]] from
an economist at the American Enterprise Institute  examined survey
data
[[link removed]] from
December 2022 (the most recent month available) and found that JUST
44 PERCENT of able-bodied, working-age Medicaid beneficiaries without
dependents worked at least 80 hours in that month.

I have produced figures like this in the past, typically by analyzing
the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population
Survey (CPS ASEC). I found this particular estimate intriguing because
it uses the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) rather
than the CPS ASEC. So I figured I would dive into the SIPP to see what
numbers it actually provides about this topic.

According to the SIPP, in December of 2022, the US population was
328.6 million people, of whom 73.2 million were receiving Medicaid.
[[link removed]]Of
those on Medicaid, 6.7 million are elderly, 29.3 million are children,
and the remaining 37.2 million are working-age adults.
[[link removed]]

Of the working-age adults on Medicaid, 9.5 million are parents, 13.8
million are disabled, and 13.9 million are able-bodied adults without
dependents (ABAWDs).
[[link removed]]Of
the ABAWDs on Medicaid, 8.1 million (58 percent) worked eighty or more
hours in December of 2022. Another 1.5 million worked eighty or more
hours in a prior month in 2022 while another 0.3 million had been
enrolled in Medicaid for less than a year. Combining all three of
these figures shows that there are only 4 million ABAWDS who are
persistently enrolled in Medicaid and work fewer than eighty hours a
month. This is about 29 percent of ABAWDs, 5 percent of all Medicaid
recipients, and 1 percent of the US population.
[[link removed]]My
results significantly differ from the results published at AEI for two
main reasons.

First, the AEI figures only count people as disabled if they are
currently receiving SSI or some other kind of disability benefit. But
not everyone who is disabled is currently receiving disability
benefits. Some individuals have short-term disabilities. Others are
receiving Medicaid while they work through the disability
determination process, which can take years. Still others have fallen
through the cracks of the disability benefit system in one way or
another.

Luckily, in addition to collecting income information, SIPP directly
asks people whether they have a disability that makes it difficult for
them to work or find employment and asks people whether they have one
of the six core disabilities — seeing, hearing, walking,
dressing/bathing, doing errands alone, or cognitive problems —
regularly tracked by the Census. Including individuals that answer yes
to these questions results in another 8.8 million disabled people that
AEI wrongly counts as able-bodied.

Second, in addition to looking at whether individuals worked
eighty-plus hours in December 2022, I used the longitudinal features
of the SIPP to see how many worked eighty-plus hours in one of the
other months of 2022 and how many had been enrolled in Medicaid for
less than a year. Individuals in these latter two groups are not
persistently workless Medicaid users of the sort conservatives want
people to believe are extremely numerous in the Medicaid system.

Once these changes are made, what we find is that 71 percent, rather
than 44 percent, of ABAWDs on Medicaid are not persistently workless
dole scroungers. Of course, some of the 4 million people who end up in
the residual “Everyone Else” bucket above are students and people
who simply cannot find a job despite trying. Absolutely none of this
suggests there is a serious social problem here in need of addressing.

===

Matt Bruenig is the founder of People’s Policy Project
[[link removed]].

* Medicaid; Disablilty; Unemployment;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]