Work requirements aren’t about work
By 
Republicans want to impose work requirements on social welfare programs for exactly one reason: they don’t support social welfare programs and work requirements are a way of preventing people from getting benefits, including people who work:
In any event, Democrats and the press should be clear-eyed about what Republicans are doing when they press for new work requirements on Medicaid, food stamps, and TANF. The ostensible purpose of these policies is to liberate the poor from dependence on welfare while increasing labor-force participation, but all available evidence indicates that the GOP’s proposals would yield negligible impacts on employment at the cost of cutting off health care and food aid to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of working, low-income Americans because of missed paperwork and bureaucratic errors.
If work requirements do not actually serve their official purpose, they are highly effective at their actual one. The Republican Party does not want all working, low-income Americans to enjoy public health insurance and nutritional aid. Their aim is not merely to strip welfare from the idle poor but to slash social-welfare spending in general. They are quite explicit about this intention.
Work requirements allow them to make progress on this objective precisely because such rules reliably deny benefits to the working Americans who comprise the vast majority of prime-age social-welfare recipients. What’s more, the policy enables the GOP to slash aid to such beneficiaries in a politically palatable way.
The House GOP’s most egregious proposal is to append work requirements to Medicaid. On a theoretical level, it is difficult to see why denying someone access to basic medical care would render them more capable of contributing to the economy. The idea that many Americans are choosing not to work because they can get a check-up for free is quite strange. A comfortable material existence plainly requires many, many things beyond health insurance.
And the empirical case for Medicaid work requirements is even weaker than the theoretical one. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 93 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries ages 19 to 64 are either working, attending school, caregiving, or suffering from a disabling ailment. As for that remaining 7 percent: Giving people access to health-care coverage makes them more likely to obtain and maintain employment. Thus, Medicaid is itself a work-promoting policy.
The “laboratories of democracy” provide more concrete evidence for the folly of Medicaid work requirements. In 2018, Arkansas imposed work requirements on its Medicaid beneficiaries, and the policy accomplished none of its ostensible objectives. Not only did the requirements fail to increase employment, but they actually cost the state and federal government $26.1 million in the short term because of the administrative burdens of implementing the new requirements. Meanwhile, nearly 16,000 low-income Arkansans lost their health coverage. Only 1,232 of those individuals were actually nonworking. In other words: Roughly 92 percent of those who lost health insurance owing to Medicaid’s work requirements did so because of paperwork problems, not because they were neglecting to contribute to the economy.
This result was not hard to anticipate. Arkansas’s rules initially required Medicaid recipients to submit documentation of their work on a complex website that required both access to the internet and skill at navigating it. The website also shut down between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. each day. And if Medicaid enrollees failed to complete their submission by the fifth day of every month, they lost their coverage.
If Republicans’ support for work requirements were genuinely motivated by a concern that Medicaid disincentivizes work, then Arkansas’s experiment would have led the party to abandon the policy. But if the GOP actually wanted to deny health insurance to the working poor — both out of an ideological hostility to social welfare and a desire to free up fiscal space for cutting taxes on the wealthy in the long term — then you would expect them to deem Arkansas a success story and push to take its policy national. They have, of course, done the latter.
And thanks to Manchin, Sinema, and their fellow fellow-travelers, the debt ceiling still exists and may well result in work requirements being imposed on various federal programs in exchange for nothing. But at least surely this is a one-shot deal and Republicans will never try to use extortion tactics again!