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While Democrats predict major problems with a provision within the “one big, beautiful bill” that adds a work requirement for adults to be eligible for Medicaid, Republican senators are praising the requirement, saying, “We’ve got to get back to work.”
The provision requires able-bodied, childless adults between the ages of 18 and 64 to work at least 80 hours a month to be eligible to receive Medicaid benefits. Individuals can also meet the requirement by participating in community service, going to school or engaging in a work program.
“We have folks back home right now harvesting wheat that are working 20 hours in a day,” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., told Fox News Digital. “We want you to go to college, we want to volunteer, work 20 hours a week, it brings dignity, it brings purpose to your lives. Work is a great thing; it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Seven million healthy American men out there of working age are not working right now,” Marshall continued. “We happen to have seven million open jobs as well. I think I want to do everything I can to help those seven million men find a job. Whether that’s through an education or community colleges, technical colleges, I think there’s lots of opportunity out there.”
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Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., said “the disincentives to work are a real problem here in America.”
“It’s amazing that Democrats are trying to make this argument,” he said. “I don’t think that taxpayers should be footing the bill at all for able-bodied citizens. And certainly, non-citizens should not be getting the benefit of this.”
“We need to incentivize work,” Hagerty went on. “And certainly, you don’t want to be incentivizing a burden on taxpayers.”
“We’ve got to take care of the people that need to be taken care of and it’s just unfortunate you’ve got a lot of freeloaders in this country,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala.
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Tuberville claimed that many of those he deemed as freeloaders “are coming from the younger ranks because they’ve grown up, they’ve got all these student loans, they got a degree that’s not worth anything, they can’t get a job or they don’t want to work and so the way they’ve done they’ve turned into socialists, they started living off the government.”
“We can’t have that. We’ve got to get back to work. This country is built on hard work,” he said.
Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said he also agrees with the work requirement, telling Fox News Digital that “quite honestly, what we’re trying to do is stop enrollment in that Obamacare addition to Medicaid.”
“They call it Medicaid expansion, but it’s Obamcare. It was Democrats’ way of trying to turn us into a single-payer system. And so, it incentivized the states to sign up single able-bodied individuals,” he claimed.
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“As a result,” he went on. “We’ve created all kinds of [what] I would call legalized fraud on the part of states … Now that they’ve designed their budgets around that scam, now they’re screaming when we’re trying to end the scam.”
Additionally, while Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., expressed that “of course, we should always eliminate any kind of fraud and that kind of a waste,” other Democrats were much less enthusiastic about the work requirement.
“That provision is not designed for efficiency or to save people money that provision is designed to kick people off of Medicaid, like don’t believe the hype,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.
Murphy claimed that Republicans “have built a work requirement that they know people won’t be able to satisfy because they hate the idea that Medicaid actually helps the working poor in this country.”
“So, there’s going to be a whole bunch of people who work for a living who are not going to be able to comply with those provisions and are going to lose their healthcare, even though they’re working,” he said. “That’s the intent of the provision and everybody should just be honest about that.”
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Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., indicated that the provision will “kick 17 million people off of health insurance.”
“These are life and death situations that people are making,” he said, adding, “This legislation is going to kick 300,000 of my constituents off of their health care coverage.”
“These are people that I’ve spoken to that can’t afford it,” he continued. “They have no money in their budget to go and buy health care. So, then they got to make a decision between eating and their rent, or they just don’t go to the doctor.”
James Agresti, president of Just Facts, a public policy research institute, told Fox News Digital that despite Democrats’ claims about the work requirements, he believes reality tells a different story.
“The notion that able-bodied adults without young children cannot work, get an education, or volunteer for 20 hours a week is absurd,” he said.
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“Murphy’s rhetoric is refuted by decades of experience with other welfare programs that have work requirements, like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families,” he explained.
Agresti said that according to an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 1.4 million noncitizens and 9.2 million able-bodied adults who won’t work or are engaged in fraud will be removed from Medicaid eligibility.
A spokesperson for Kelly’s office told Fox News Digital that “a bunch of actual experts and media outlets correctly interpreting that same CBO report” estimate that 11.8 million people will be without health insurance by 2034 because of the provision, plus an additional 5.1 million because of the bill ending expanded Affordable Care Act credits.
In response, Agresti said the bill “doesn’t revoke the expanded Obamacare subsidies, which were a temporary COVID-era handout that Democrats enacted in the American Rescue Plan and extended in the Inflation Reduction Act.”
“Even the New York Times has reported that adding these numbers into the tally for the big, beautiful bill ‘is an exaggeration’ and not ‘the real number,’” said Agresti.
He also said that numerous studies have proven that the disincentive to work is a real problem in America.
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“Even Lawrence Summers, Obama’s chief economist and Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, has written that ‘government assistance programs’ provide ‘an incentive, and the means, not to work,’” he said.
Murphy’s office did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.
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