Right-wing media figures are telling their audiences that proposed work requirements for Medicaid will be targeted at men who are unwilling to look for a job, when the actual population most likely to be affected is poor, rural women who are taking care of elderly parents or adult children.
The discussion comes as congressional Republicans negotiate a budget bill that is widely predicted to deliver massive tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations while gutting social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. The House passed its version of the bill on May 22, which included what Axios described as “the biggest Medicaid rewrite in the history of the safety-net program, which will likely result in millions of Americans losing their health insurance coverage.”
One of the ways the House's legislation reduces Medicaid costs is by introducing arduous and unnecessary work requirements for beneficiaries that would begin at the end of 2026. The Congressional Budget Office, which provides nonpartisan economic analysis to lawmakers, estimated that 10.3 million people would lose their Medicaid by 2034 if the bill was passed in its May 14 form. The New York Times cited the same figure in its coverage of the House bill’s passage. (The bill also adds work requirements to SNAP, which could put almost 11 million people at risk of losing some of their food assistance.)
Much of the right-wing commentary supporting the bill mischaracterizes Medicaid beneficiaries by claiming there is a large pool of “able-bodied” people who refuse to seek employment. In fact, 92 percent of people on Medicaid are working, have a disability, or are performing duties — such as going to school or caregiving — that could qualify for an exemption from meeting work requirements.
It’s true that there is a group of people who qualify as able-bodied, nonworking Medicaid recipients without a young child who also aren’t enrolled in school. But contrary to conservative punditry, that population is overwhelmingly made up of women (79%), mostly living in rural areas, who are caring for elderly parents or adult children and have low levels of formal education and have recently left the workforce, according to new research from the University of Massachusetts Boston.
“Work requirements would primarily target this population,” the researchers write.
Jesse Watters: work requirements target young men who “sell ecstasy on the side"
Fox News, Fox Business, and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page — three gilded properties in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — have pushed for cuts to Medicaid, either by adding work requirements or through an outright rollback of the program’s expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Slashing Medicaid is incredibly unpopular, including among supporters of President Donald Trump, so on some occasions Fox has misled its viewers into thinking the Republican budget doesn’t pose a threat to the program.
But as Trump has thrown his weight behind the bill, so too has Fox modified its austerity-heavy rhetoric.
Following the House’s passage of the bill, Fox national correspondent Aishah Hasnie said some Republicans from states that have “a lot of constituents on Medicaid” were “worried there were going to be massive cuts.”
“Really, Republicans wanted to go after illegal immigrants that were using Medicaid and able-bodied men that were on Medicaid,” she continued. “They wanted to add work requirements, and those work requirements now will start in 2026. It’s a huge win for fiscal conservatives.”
On May 19, host Jesse Watters said, “If you're a young, able-bodied, healthy American man — 26 years old, you don't even want to go to work — you can get on Medicaid.”
“You can live at your parents’ house, play softball on the weekend, sell ecstasy on the side, not even look for a job — and you can get free health care,” Watters added. “That’s what they’re doing. They’re just closing that lazy loophole."
The same day on Fox & Friends, on at least two occasions co-host Charlie Hurt falsely argued that work requirements strengthened Medicaid.
“A major Democrat attack on the bill is they claim it cuts Medicaid,” Hurt said. “What it actually does is it saves Medicaid by not paying, first of all, people who are ineligible for it, but also because it doesn’t — it puts in work requirements for, you know, 30-year-old, able-bodied males without dependents, and it says, you know, if you are going to get welfare from the government, you're going to need to work, and that seems like a really low standard to a regular person."
Elsewhere in the program, Hurt argued the bill strengthens Medicaid and “protects it by getting people off that — able-bodied, 30-year-old men … without dependents ought to be working."
Bannon says work requirements for able-bodied men should be minimum “40 to 60 hours”
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has attempted to present himself as both a defender of Medicaid and an advocate for large cuts to the program. One of the ways he tries to reconcile that contradiction is by dividing Medicaid users into the deserving and undeserving poor, using rhetoric strikingly similar to Fox’s.
On May 13, Bannon acknowledged that in the United States “we don’t have great jobs, and that’s why a lot of MAGA is on Medicaid."
“An able-bodied seaman ought to be putting in, I don’t know, 40-60 hours?” Bannon said, reminding his audience of his former career as a Naval officer. “If it’s a month they ought to just rack it up."
“If you’re able-bodied, you’ve got to show that you’ve got work requirements, minimum,” he continued.
In February, Bannon also mischaracterized the Medicaid population as laden with nonworking, able-bodied men.
“Right now, why are people on Medicaid? It's economic distress,” Bannon said. “They don't want to be on Medicaid. It's economic distress. You’ve got 18 million men not in the workforce. Able-bodied men — 18 million men in this nation not in the workforce."
Right-wing pundits push “able-bodied” trope without specifying gender
Some right-wing coverage of work requirements pushes the trope of the able-bodied, nonworking Medicaid recipient without specifying gender.
On May 19, Bannon took aim at the Medicaid expansion population, even as he acknowledged how many Trump supporters could get hurt by slashing the program.
“I’m one of the proponents of not cutting Medicaid to the bone because you’ve got a ton of working class people on Medicaid now,” he said.
“You’ve got the able-bodied that are not even doing basic checks because of what Biden put in,” he added, apparently referring to states that joined the Medicaid expansion during Biden’s term.
The following day, Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum claimed that “Medicaid was designed for low-income families with children, pregnant women, the elderly, people with disabilities, and people in need of long-term care."
“It was not designed for able-bodied people who can work and aren't working,” she continued, adding that the government should make sure only “people who deserve these benefits can get them."
On May 15, the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro devoted nearly five minutes to reading and praising an op-ed in The New York Times written by four top Trump administration officials in support of work requirements.
Shapiro argued that for able-bodied people who aren’t working, it’s “not because of lack of job opportunity,” and concluded by telling Medicaid recipients to “get off your butt and work."
Taking Arkansas’ disastrous experiment nationwide
The op-ed from the Trump officials that Shapiro endorsed relied heavily on a report from a conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. The report found that “Medicaid work requirements would target a large number of recipients, many of whom do not currently work a sufficient number of hours to comply.” The author acknowledged his finding “appears to contrast with the conclusions of some similar analyses, which suggest that most Medicaid recipients who can work, do work.” (Hyperlinks in original.)
Given that discrepancy, it’s worth examining AEI’s record on the issue. In 2018, AEI published a blog headlined “The Truth About Medicaid Work Requirements,” which discussed the first Trump administration’s approval of Arkansas’ request to mandate work requirements for its Medicaid population.
“Critics have warned of catastrophe” that will “threaten the well-being of low-income Americans,” the article states, before adding, “A closer look at what the states are actually proposing suggests these claims are overblown."
“It’s hard to imagine why those not exempt could not easily meet these requirements,” the piece concludes.
AEI’s predictions proved totally wrong. When Arkansas followed through and mandated work requirements for Medicaid in 2018, more than 18,000 recipients — roughly 1 in 4 statewide — lost their coverage, even though “more than 95% of the target population appeared to meet the requirements or qualify for an exemption,” according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
There were myriad reasons for the program’s catastrophic failure. The NEJM study found that “the implementation of this policy was plagued by confusion among many enrollees,” and a “lack of Internet access was also a barrier to reporting information to the state."
Research from liberal think tank the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities further found that people “who were supposed to be exempted from submitting monthly proof of their work hours were not always shielded from losing coverage."
“People were confused because of the different types of exemptions that were available and varying timelines for re-verifying different exemptions,” CBPP concluded.
And the policy also failed on its own terms. As the NEJM study noted, the study didn’t find “any significant change in employment” or in the amount “of hours worked or overall rates of community engagement activities."
Illustratively, AEI reacted to the NEJM study — which undermined the arguments the conservative think tank had put forward — by simply dismissing it. In a 2023 blog, AEI wrote that the study “attempted to assess the effects of Medicaid work requirements on employment, but challenges associated with implementing the policy and studying its effects make those results difficult to interpret."
It’s safe to say that for the more than 18,000 Arkansans who lost their Medicaid, the ultimate effect of the work requirement mandate was not difficult to interpret. Right-wing media figures now want to take that disastrous experiment nationwide, all to fund a tax cut that will overwhelmingly benefit the extremely wealthy. Attacking the trope of the able-bodied man who refuses to work is simply their latest tactic.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.
