Mississippi's lieutenant governor wants to pump the brakes on plans to expand Medicaid in the state until former President Donald Trump can be re-elected to the White House.
According to the Mississippi Free Press, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann wants to do this for one simple reason: he wants to be able to apply to add work requirements to the program, which the Biden administration hasn't authorized.
"The House and Senate failed to reach a compromise on Medicaid expansion after Hosemann, the Senate president, and other Senate leaders insisted on tethering it to work requirements that President Joe Biden’s administration is unlikely to approve," reported Heather Harrison. "The Republican Senate president said he’s spoken with leaders from Louisiana, Arkansas, Iowa and North Carolina, who have all applied for work requirements to expand Medicaid in their respective states."
“What we were doing is following what they thought was the appropriate thing. Now, if they don’t approve it, quite frankly, President Trump approved 13 of these before President Biden took them away,” said Hosemann to reporters.
“So in November, where we have an election where we got the president of the United States as a Republican, then it would have sailed through. Instead, I got to wait until next January to apply, so we could’ve been over that step.”
Mississippi is one of just a handful of remaining states that hasn't expanded Medicaid under a program authorized over a decade ago by the Affordable Care Act, which authorized federal funding to cover anyone making below 138 percent of the federal poverty line. Currently in Mississippi, Medicaid is a far more limited program that doesn't universally cover everyone in that income group.
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The controversial work requirement schemes authorized by Trump while he was in office, and later rescinded by the Biden administration, generally required "able-bodied adults" otherwise eligible for Medicaid to prove some number of regular hours of employment — although several of these plans were blocked by federal courts.
Data showed the requirements led to dramatic loss of coverage, including for many people who were working, disabled, or otherwise still eligible for coverage, but whose applications got lost in red tape. Several studies suggested that these programs didn't actually increase the number of people working, but did increase the uninsured rate.
Republicans have often tried to force the Biden administration to restore the requirements. Last year, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) managed to slip a provision into one of the debt ceiling proposals that would have taken the requirements nationwide, although that bill never became law.