A look at it

The tax cut and expenditure calculation just adopted contains new work requirements for Medicaid. Georgia has a system, but justified recipients had problems with the enrollment and stay.

Michel Martin, host:

According to the new tax and expenditure laws of the Republicans, people in Medicaid are new requirements. This includes work requirements for adults with low income. Although others tried, Georgia is the only state that currently has. Wabes Jess Mador looks at how it works.

Jess Mador, Byline: Tannisha Corporal is in principle not against work requirements. But then she left her job as a social worker to found her own non -profit organization.

Tannisha Corporal: I never thought that I would encounter the challenges that I made when I tried to be approved because I know the process.

Mador: Corporal had prediabetes and other medical concerns.

Corporal: Because I have breast cancer in my family history, I had to get my mammograms.

Mador: Then Corporal learned that she qualified for Georgias to the reporting program. It offers Medicaid for adults the federal poverty limit if you can prove that you work voluntarily at school or at least 80 hours a month. She reported at least as much. So she collected her documents to check her duties and hours and applied for via the online portal.

Corporal: And we were denied.

Mador: Corporal has a master in social work. But even she spent about eight months to get into the program and only invited documents up so that they can collapse or seem to disappear in the portal. Here is only one of the rejection letters she got.

Corporal: Your case was rejected because you did not submit the right documents and did not meet the qualifying activity requirements.

Mador: It was difficult to reach someone in the state Medicaid agency to explain why.

Corporal: Or you will say that you called you. And we look at our call protocol. I am like, nobody called me. And as in the letter it says that you missed your appointment and it will come on the same day.

Mador: Corporal's application was finally approved, only after she had talked about her experiences in a public hearing covered by Atlanta News Outlets. Now she has Medicaid, but she still has to be new to work or work voluntarily every month.

Corporal: Even if I have come through the bureaucracy and was approved, it now brings another degree of fear.

Mador: Laura Colbert heads the Advocacy group Georgian for a healthy future. She says that the experience of corporal is typical.

Laura Colbert: People just can't have registered. And some people who have enrolled lose their reporting because the system believes that they did not submit their documents or there were another mistake.

Mador: She says that reporting requires reliable internet access or transport every month. Both Georgians with low incomes may not have. A spokesman for the Georgia Department of Human Services said in an e -mail that the state introduced a number of technical corrections to improve the process. Joan Alker is an expert in health policy at Georgetown University. She said that when Arkansas tried the work requirements in 2018, it was not going well. More than 18,000 people lost their reporting after they had not met the new requirements.

Joan Alker: Many problems were similar to Georgia in terms of the website closed at night. People couldn't get people.

Mador: And Alker emphasizes that national work requirements probably do not increase employment. More than two thirds of medicaid recipients already work. The rest are mainly students or people who are too sick or disabled to work.

Alker: Work requirements only work to cut people from health insurance.

Mador: And they cost a lot to implement. Georgia has been running paths to reporting for two years. The registration system alone cost more than 50 million US dollars, and almost 7,500 people are currently enrolled.

I am Jess Mador in Atlanta for NPR News.

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Martin: This story comes from the NPR partnership with Wabe and Kff Health News.

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