For Utah, A Work Requirement by Any Other Name … Will Still Be Struck Down in Court

To date, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has approved Medicaid work requirement waivers in 11 states, accepting these states’ various justifications for adding onerous requirements that will likely lead to significant coverage losses. However, lawsuits challenging CMS’s approval of Medicaid work requirements have successfully prevented most states from implementing them. Now, to avoid litigation, states like Utah are introducing work requirements that are supposedly less severe. But these burdensome work requirements still fail to pass legal muster and are still vulnerable to lawsuits.

As outlined in our analysis, Utah’s newly-implemented work requirement waiver includes many of the same justifications as other states’ applications — justifications that have been challenged and refuted in court. Therefore, it is only a matter of time before Utah faces the same legal challenges, resulting in the same verdicts striking down their work requirement as a violation of the Medicaid statute.

Click the “download” button below for details on the justifications Utah uses for its work requirement waiver, along with how similar justifications from other states have been treated in the courts.