Washington
The lawsuit — spearheaded by three public-interest legal groups — accuses the federal Department of Health and Human Services of violating the core purpose of the half-century-old government health plan for the poor by granting a request from Kentucky to impose the work mandate.
It charges federal officials in Washington and state officials in Kentucky with taking steps designed to reduce access to Medicaid’s protections, including complex reporting mandates, higher costs and the work requirement.
“Allowing the state to ignore fundamental Medicaid protections will result in large numbers of low-income individuals and families losing health care coverage,” said Jane Perkins, legal director of the National Health Law Program, which is representing the plaintiffs alongside the Kentucky Equal Justice Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The Trump administration this month granted a request from Kentucky to break with decades of Medicaid policy and require working-age adults who are not disabled or acutely ill to work a minimum number of hours each week or participate in other “community engagement” activities, such as seeking work, going to school or volunteering.
Those who don’t meet the requirements or don’t provide adequate documentation will lose coverage.
Kentucky has projected significant cost reductions under the new policy, largely because growing numbers of poor Kentuckians will be caught up in the complex reporting requirements and paperwork, causing them to lose coverage.
Washington
Trump responded by accusing the boycotting mayors of putting the needs of “criminal illegal immigrants over law-abiding Americans.”
Officials sent letters to roughly two dozen jurisdictions threatening to issue subpoenas if they don’t willingly relinquish documents showing they aren’t withholding information about the citizenship or immigration status of people in custody. The department has repeatedly threatened to deny millions of dollars in important grant money to communities that refuse to comply with a federal statute requiring information-sharing with federal authorities, as part of the Trump administration’s promised crackdown on cities and states that refuse to help enforce U.S. immigration laws.
Washington
The framework to be unveiled on Monday “represents a compromise that members of both parties can support,” spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, as the White House appeared to try to take control of the process amid criticism that the president has taken too much of a back seat during the negotiations and sent mixed signals that have repeatedly upended near-deals.
“After decades of inaction by Congress, it’s time we work together to solve this issue once and for all,” Sanders said.
Meanwhile, senators from both parties started a fresh search for their own compromise immigration legislation, but leaders conceded that the effort won’t be easy and were already casting blame should the effort falter.
Around three dozen senators, evenly divided among Republicans and Democrats, were to meet late Wednesday in what No. 2 Senate GOP leader John Cornyn, of Texas, said was a chance to “get people thinking about a framework that might actually work.” Their goal is to produce a bipartisan package to protect from deportation the “Dreamers” — hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the U.S. illegally after being brought here as children — and to provide billions to toughen border security.
“We cannot let those who are anti-immigrant, who call giving the Dreamers hope ‘amnesty,’ block us. Because then we will fail, and it will be on the other side of the aisle that made that happen,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
— Wire reports