By Rea Hederman and Andrew Kidd
The Hill, Dec. 3, 2018
When Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) added healthy, able-bodied adults without dependent children to the list of beneficiaries, policymakers overlooked the substantial price paid by these recipients who, as the Congressional Budget Office once forecasted, forego hourly wages and earnings in order to maintain their Medicaid eligibility.In a new paper, Healthy and Working: Benefits of Work Requirements for Medicaid Recipients, the authors explain that healthy and single Medicaid recipients working less than 20 hours a week, afraid to work more at the risk of losing their benefits, may actually sacrifice hundreds of thousands of dollars in earnings over their lifetime—more than $212,000 for women and $323,000 for men. Medicaid’s non-work incentive has some not-so-healthy consequences. Read More…