States are grumbling about the cost of implementing new work requirements for working-age Medicaid beneficiaries.
“[I]t’s taking a significant amount of financial resources away from a system that people depend on,” Marvin B. Figueroa, the Virginia secretary of Health and Human Services, recently said.
But that argument gets the issue backward. The cost of administering work requirements will be dwarfed by the savings they generate. More importantly, those requirements will help preserve Medicaid for the poor and vulnerable Americans it was created to serve.
