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After Judge Blocked Kentucky Medicaid Work Requirements, Trump Administration Approves Them Again

Federal health officials announced Tuesday night that they had, for a second time, approved Kentucky’s plan to impose “community engagement” requirements as part of Medicaid, saying they could start in April, nine months after they originally were to have taken effect.

 By Amy Goldstein

The Trump administration has reinstated permission for Kentucky to compel many of its low-income residents on Medicaid to work or prepare for a job, after a federal court had blocked the state’s ability to begin the requirements.

Federal health officials announced Tuesday night that they had, for a second time, approved Kentucky’s plan to impose “community engagement” requirements as part of Medicaid, saying they could start in April, nine months after they originally were to have taken effect.

Kentucky has been a lightning rod in the administration’s rewriting of the rules for the public health insurance system for poor Americans by inserting long-held conservative ideas — about individual responsibility and a limited government helping hand — for the first time in the history of a program run jointly by the federal government and states that began under the War on Poverty of the 1960s.

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