As a constituent, I urge you to oppose HB 2024, HB 2138, and any legislation that would make it more difficult for families that rely on Medicaid to qualify for and keep their benefits.

Medicaid is a critical program that provides care for seniors, people with disabilities, children, and families struggling to make ends meet, and bills such as HB 2024 and HB 2138 that would impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients are nothing more than Medicaid cuts in disguise. This bill punishes people who are already struggling financially while raising kids and dealing with ongoing health issues by locking them out of their health coverage and ending their treatment. This makes them sicker and less likely to be able to find or keep a job.

Implementing these requirements will also create new layers of red tape, which will be costly to administer and will increase the strain on the system. We should spend our limited Medicaid dollars on helping people stay healthy and find good jobs, not on creating new government bureaucracy in order to administer these burdensome requirements.

I am counting on you to oppose any bill that causes people to lose the coverage they need to stay healthy and find work.