KFF Health News September 5, 2025
It was March 2020, and Robert Gordon was about to kick some 80,000 people off health insurance.
As the Michigan state health director, he had spent the past year, and some $30 million in state tax dollars, trying to avoid that very thing.
Gordon was a Democrat, a veteran of the Obama administration, and he did not want people to lose the Medicaid coverage they had recently gained through the Affordable Care Act.
But Gordon and his boss, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, had reluctantly inherited a law passed two years earlier, when Republicans led the state. And that law mandated that Michigan institute a work requirement for Medicaid on Jan. 1, 2020.
Gordon and his team determined that most enrollees...
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