WASHINGTON—Wildlife technician. Probation officer. Flower clerk at the supermarket outside town. Anything, really.Christina Childers’s family has been poor for generations, and she isn’t picky. With a community college degree in hand and a university degree coming soon, Childers says she has been applying for more or less every decent job within three counties of tiny Campton, a rural Kentucky community with two dollar stores and not much else. She’s had no luck yet. For that sin, she might soon lose her health insurance. With the permission of the Trump administration, Kentucky last week became the first U.S. state to require poor people to do some form of work in exchange for continuing to get government health coverage. No previous president has allowed states to require labour to qualify for the Medicaid program. Since its creation in 1965, Medicaid has been available to everyone, employed or unemployed, whose income is below an income threshold set by their state — in Kentucky, $16,394 per year. Kentucky’s new rule, announced by Republican Gov. Matt Bevin, targets adults who are not “medically frail” or serving as primary caregivers for their dependants. It will require them to work 80 hours a month — or spend 80 hours volunteering, job-training, searching for a job or enrolled in school — if they want to remain covered. At least nine other Republican-run states have asked Trump to let them impose similar rules. Though he campaigned as a protector of Medicaid and a champion of the “forgotten,” he is likely to approve.The move to work requirements has appalled advocates for the poor and many medical professionals, who say such rules are counterproductive, cruel and possibly illegal under the federal law that established Medicaid, which makes no mention of such rules. And it has terrified many of the hundreds of thousands of Medicaid recipients who say the program is keeping them alive an ...
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