Indiana's non-disabled, non-elderly adults on Medicaid will soon have to prove their employment status to keep their health insurance under Senate Enrolled Act 1, which Gov. Mike Braun just signed into law.
The new state law not only comports with the federal work requirements passed in President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act from 2025, but it goes further in its stringency. What Republicans are defending as a necessary safeguard to keep the ballooning state program intact for those who need it, Democrats and advocates are cautioning will lead to hundreds of thousands of Hoosiers losing health insurance due to administrative errors ― as many as one in five Hoosiers currently on Medicaid, according to estimates by Hoosier Action.
Republican leaders are colloquially calling this "HIP 3.0," for a new era of the Healthy Indiana Plan ― Indiana's Medicaid expansion program that dates back to 2015. The changes take effect Jan. 1, 2027.
"This bill isn't hurting any users of Medicaid," Sen. Chris Garten, R-Charlestown and the bill's author, said on the Senate floor in February. "Let me be very clear about that. Not one person who's eligible for Medicaid today will be ineligible… as long as they follow these guidelines."
Therein lies the disagreement: Advocates argue that eligible Hoosiers could very well lose coverage due to the paperwork-shuffling required ― introducing the possibility for error on the state level or hardship on the individual level. They also point to...
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