On January 24, 2018, advocacy groups filed a lawsuit on behalf of a group of Kentucky Medicaid recipients in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking class action status in an effort to stop new work requirements in the State’s Medicaid program.

As previously reported, CMS issued a letter to State Medicaid Directors on January 11, 2018, announcing a new policy change that allows States to pursue Medicaid waivers that impose work or other community engagement requirements on certain adult Medicaid recipients. Kentucky was the first State whose waiver requiring certain Medicaid recipients to prove they are working, training for a job, or volunteering as a condition of gaining Medicaid coverage was approved by CMS. The State’s section 1115 demonstration waiver was approved on January 12, 2018. The lawsuit alleges that CMS’s new policy and the Kentucky waiver go beyond what is permitted under current Medicaid authority and were imposed without following appropriate government processes.

The State estimates that changes to the Kentucky Medicaid program will remove 95,000 people from Medicaid over five years and reduce spending on health care payments for low-income Kentuckians by about $2.4 billion, although it is unclear how many of these reductions would be attributed to people earning enough money to pay for other forms of insurance, or attributed to coverage suspensions for people who failed to meet the State’s new work requirements.

The complaint is available here.