From the Arkansas Advocate – Arkansas will begin checking the employment status of some Medicaid beneficiaries this summer under what’s being billed as a “soft launch” of work requirements that aren’t set to be enforced until next year.
Mary Franklin, DHS’ director of the Division of County Operations, told lawmakers Thursday that the new work requirements under the “Big Beautiful Bill” spending and tax cut measure signed by President Donald Trump would not be enforced until January. The department planned to do the employment checks before penalties kick in since it is such a “big change” for beneficiaries, she said.
Starting in July, the agency will test the process it will use to automatically check if people are meeting the work requirements, without requiring them to submit additional information. The checks will use data already available to DHS, such as wage data or information from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which currently has a work requirement.
Franklin said this will allow a beneficiary to know if they already meet the upcoming requirements so they’d know where they stand before the requirements take effect. The state is working on procuring a call center to collect information from beneficiaries that can’t be verified through the automated process, she said.
“We’re going to let them know, if the requirement was in place today, here’s what we know about you: that you’re already working, you’re meeting the requirement, or we’ve not been able to verify that you’re meeting the requirement,” Franklin said during an Arkansas Legislative Council subcommittee meeting.
Medicaid provides low-cost health insurance to millions of low-income people and people with disabilities nationwide, and Arkansas receives billions of federal dollars each year to fund and administer the program.
The Big Beautiful Bill’s work requirements will apply to those receiving coverage through Arkansas’ Medicaid expansion program, ARHOME, starting January 2027. ARHOME provides insurance to low-income people without disabilities between the ages of 19 and 64, and insures over 220,000 Arkansans.
There are several exemptions to the requirements, such as for caregivers, pregnant and postpartum women, people who were recently incarcerated, people with special medical needs and others.
Those who don’t qualify for an exemption must complete 80 hours of work, community service, higher education, work programming or a combination of the four each month to keep their insurance. People applying for coverage are required to have met the requirements for one to three months prior to applying under the new law, and compliance will be reevaluated every six months.
More than 18,000 people lost coverage when Arkansas last had work requirements for Medicaid in 2018. That requirement, which applied to able-bodied adults on the state’s Medicaid expansion, was blocked by the federal courts and former President Joe Biden’s administration.
DHS spokesperson Gavin Lesnick said in an emailed statement that the agency would be conducting extensive outreach to Medicaid recipients prior to beginning compliance checks in July.
Leo Cuello, a Medicaid policy expert and professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families, said that the early verifications ran the risk of causing more confusion for beneficiaries rather than less.
“It makes a lot of sense for the state to be running tests of their automation ability,” Cuello said. “However, it would raise concerns if they were putting those results into the notices they’re giving consumers.”
Cuello said it wasn’t surprising that DHS planned to provide notice of the changes to beneficiaries since federal law requires such notifications. But Cuello said sending notices containing the results of the status check could cause recipients to think a decision about their compliance has already been made, rather than when the rule is in effect.
Lesnick said the practice round would do the opposite.
“The soft launch will minimize confusion by educating beneficiaries about the coming changes beginning half a year before they go into effect,” Lesnick wrote. “This provides ample time to understand the new program and prepare to meet the requirement in 2027.”
Franklin told legislators that her agency was still waiting for final guidance from the federal government on how to implement the sweeping new requirements. She said they expected the guidance to come by June.
That lack of guidance from the federal government may only exacerbate the confusion that could be caused by doing these verifications now, Cuello said.
“There’s a huge risk that notices that go out in July would draw conclusions about compliance or exemption that are not in keeping with the rules,” Cuello said. “Because the state simply won’t have had enough time to adjust its systems to figure out what the right answers are.”
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