EDITORIAL: Biden Medicaid ruling risks shrinking Michigan workforce

Apr. 13—Michigan leaders now need to work around the Biden administration's removal of work requirements for those enrolled in the Healthy Michigan Medicaid expansion program. It's crucial that healthy, employable residents be working or finding employment instead of endlessly relying on welfare.

Medicaid benefits are intended for people in a desperate place, not for supporting them indefinitely. The state now must find other ways to incentivize capable beneficiaries to work instead of waiting for a check written by taxpayers.

This is particularly crucial now. With the economy reopening and growing, Michigan businesses are reporting difficulty in finding enough workers to support that growth. The federal government is already providing incentives not to return to work with its COVID-19 relief checks and extended unemployment benefit supplements.

Michigan needs to do everything it can to encourage citizens who have been dependent on the government to rejoin the job market.

The Biden administration recently withdrew Michigan's Medicaid work requirements, claiming that they were likely to cause confusion, benefit losses, more paperwork for the state and more hardship for the 900,000 beneficiaries of the plan.

More likely the move is a knee-jerk reaction to Trump administration policies. That's a shame, because the requirements were intended to test ways to get capable members of Healthy Michigan working.

"I'm not surprised but I am disappointed," says Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, R-Clarklake. "These were for testing an idea. But the requirements kept getting caught up in courts, so we never had a chance to prove it."

Shirkey says the original requirements were a way to determine if those enrolled in Michigan's Medicaid program would be encouraged to apply for job openings.

But a judge vacated the Trump administration's approval of the requirements in March last year. The requirements would have mandated specific groups of able-bodied recipients work or pursue jobs or job training for at least 80 hours a month or lose Medicaid coverage.

At the time, 80,000 residents would have been ineligible under the requirements, a testament to the extent of the issues the requirements were trying to fix.

Shirkey says he hopes the Biden administration will work with Michigan on a new pilot program that builds career pathways for those enrolled in Healthy Michigan as a collaboration between state and federal governments and businesses.

"These workers are bumping their heads against the upper limit," Shirkey says. "They can't work the next hour because they'll lose their health benefits."

Shirkey says it would be better if there were provisions that incentivized employees in Medicaid to collect the benefit while working to allow employers to test them out and take the risk out of the hiring process.

The goal of getting healthy, capable people receiving taxpayer money off welfare and back into the job market shouldn't be partisan, and the Biden administration should agree to try proposals intended to help with that goal.

Lansing should try to work with the Biden administration to retool the Healthy Michigan pilot program, if possible, and increase the pool of employees available to worker-starved employers.