By: Jane Perkins
Executive Summary
The Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has maintained in Stewart v. Azar that nothing in the Medicaid Act limits his ability to waive portions of it, the National Health Law Program, Kentucky Equal Justice Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center state in their May 14 reply to the motions by HHS and the Kentucky government to dismiss the lawsuit challenging HHS’s approval of Kentucky’s Medicaid waiver project. “The Secretary’s approval also rewrites the purposes of the Act to ‘restructure[]’ Medicaid into a work-oriented program aimed at teaching people about commercial insurance. Encouraging individuals to work may be a worthy policy goal, but it is manifestly not the goal of Medicaid, which Congress enacted to provide ‘medical assistance’ and ‘rehabilitation and other services’ to those individuals ‘whose income and resources are insufficient to meet the costs of necessary medical services,” the advocates’ reply states.
