When the Mississippi House of Representatives recently passed legislation implementing Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, Speaker Jason White claimed common ground with the state Senate: “They want to see a work requirement in the [Medicaid expansion] bill, and our bill has that.”
But White and his Mississippi colleagues do not know — or may not wish to understand — that a de facto work requirement to obtain coverage already exists in Mississippi and that expanding Medicaid would nullify it.
Already a De Facto Work Requirement
The answer lies in Section 1401 of Obamacare, which establishes eligibility for premium subsidies on the law’s insurance Exchanges. Because congressional Democrats originally required states to expand Medicaid to all low-income residents (a requirement the Supreme Court made optional for states in 2012), only legal aliens, who face a five-year waiting period to receive Medicaid benefits, can qualify for Exchange subsidies with below-poverty income. In all other cases, citizens need income equal to the federal poverty level to qualify for subsidies.
The left calls this scenario the “coverage gap” — people in states that have not expanded Medicaid, with incomes too small to receive Exchange subsidies. Witness the Kaiser Family Foundation’s recent primer claiming that “most childless adults with incomes below the poverty level have no options for affordable, comprehensive coverage, since [Obamacare] premium subsidies are available only for people with income levels at or above poverty.”
But those not associated with the welfare-industrial complex may see an obvious solution that Kaiser cannot see —
