Washington, D.C. – This Thursday, a federal judge sided with a coalition of 25 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s requirement that states force chronically ill people to prove they are unable to work in order to access life-saving health care. GOP work requirements were already designed to throw millions off their coverage to bankroll tax breaks for billionaires before the Trump administration added additional cruelty to the chaos with their work rule. The Trump administration’s work rule and definition of “medical frailty” were set to throw an additional nearly two million Americans off their Medicaid coverage between 2027 and 2034, including many people with cancer, HIV, and other chronic conditions. Eight million people have already lost their Medicaid, CHIP, or ACA coverage since Republicans passed the largest cuts to health care in history.
Protect Our Care President Brad Woodhouse issued the following statement:
“Donald Trump was not satisfied with throwing millions off their coverage, so his administration wrote this rule to be as cruel as humanly possible and cut even more people off from life-saving coverage. However, thanks to a coalition of two dozen Democratic attorneys general, including Keith Ellison, Josh Kaul, Phil Weiser, Rob Bonta, and Letitia James, the most harmful parts of this horrific rule were struck down. Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are determined to make things worse even after they created a full-blown health care crisis when they gutted $1 trillion from health care to fund tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations. In just a few days, when the American people head to the polls, they’ll know exactly who fought in their interest and who betrayed them for the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.”