Congressional Republicans want to impose work requirements aimed at “able-bodied” adults. But data shows it would actually target poor middle-aged women who have left the workforce.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates at least 13.7 million people altogether would become uninsured if the current legislation is approved, including at least 7.7 million people impacted by the changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Sixty-four percent of adult Medicaid recipients under 65 years old are working either full-time or part-time. Others do not hold traditional jobs but participate in some form of work — either through caregiving responsibilities (12 percent) or school attendance (7 percent). Another portion (10 percent) have an illness or disability, according to KFF, a health policy research nonprofit.
That leaves about 8 percent of Medicaid recipients who are not working for another mix of reasons: retirement, inability to find work or some other unnamed reason in the available data.
Within this group, most — four in five, or nearly 80 percent — are women, according to nonpartisan researchers at the University of Massachusetts Boston, who recently analyzed Census Bureau data from the 2023 American Community Survey (ACS) to reach their conclusion. The survey is a well-known standard in annual population data, with information collected from more than 3.5 million households.
Gelila Selassie, senior attorney for the advocacy organization Justice in Aging, agreed.
“This has nothing to do with getting people to work,” she said, noting available data. “These people — especially women — are either working or caregiving or in school or are disabled. So the only way for them to meet these $800 billion in cuts is by taking away health care from eligible people, because there’s just not enough ineligible people to meet those demands that they’re supposed to cut.”
