WASHINGTON — Members of a federal advisory panel expressed alarm this week that 4,350 low-income people in Arkansas had lost Medicaid coverage because they failed to show they were complying with new work requirements held up by the Trump administration as a model for the nation.
“I hope these data scare the pants off people in Arkansas,” said Dr. Christopher Gorton, a member of the panel, called the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission.
The chairwoman of the panel, Penny Thompson, said the data — the first for any state enforcing a work requirement — were “very concerning” and “very worrisome.”
The Trump administration approved Arkansas’s request to impose work requirements on certain Medicaid beneficiaries in March, one of the first of a wave of applications from Republican-run states. The administration has been encouraging work requirements for a variety of federal support programs, from food stamps to housing subsidies, and because Congress has balked, administration officials have turned to state governments to push ahead.
