Are You at Risk of Losing Your Medicaid Due to Work Requirements?

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In January, the Trump administration announced huge changes to Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income Americans: It said it would support states imposing work or other “community engagement” requirements for those using the program. This would be the first time in the program’s history that states would be allowed to require Americans to work a certain number of work hours in order to be eligible. And though the work requirements include exemptions for those who are elderly, disabled, or pregnant, among others, the new policies could put millions of adults at risk of losing their insurance.

In order to implement the work requirements, states had to apply and be approved for waivers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Since then, five states—Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin—have been approved. Ten more have applied.

In Arkansas, one of the first states to begin implementing the work requirements, nearly 12,300 people have already been disenrolled from Medicaid due to non-compliance, according to state data. Thousands more are at risk of losing their insurance. Other states with approved waivers, such as Indiana and Wisconsin, hope to implement the work requirements next year.

As we continue reporting on this issue, Mother Jones wants to hear from you: Are you at risk of losing coverage because your state has applied for Medicaid work requirements? Have you recently lost coverage? Let us know in the form below, send us an email at talk@motherjones.com, or leave us a voicemail at (510) 519-MOJO. We may use some of your responses for a follow-up story.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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