Judge blocks Trump Medicaid frailty rule, binder fails own test
A federal court spared chronically ill Medicaid recipients from proving they are sick, and spared a Maryland loading dock from 9,000 pallets.
A forklift in a Maryland warehouse did not move on Monday. It had been booked to load 9,000 pallets of binders onto trucks bound for post offices in 40 states. The binders are still there. The driver went home at noon.
The reason is a federal judge. The judge blocked the Trump administration's rule that would have made chronically ill people on Medicaid prove they were frail enough to skip new work requirements. ABC News and Al Jazeera have the court details. I have the binder details.
The health department hired me to test the test. I am a scientist. The first thing I did was weigh it. It weighs nine pounds. You always weigh the thing before you test the thing. That is not a finding. That is just good manners.
Then I read it. Page nine sets the standard. A person counts as frail if they cannot lift eight pounds from a table to a shelf. Page one says the applicant must carry the binder to the exam in person. The binder is nine pounds. I noticed this on a Monday and did not sleep.
I asked 90 volunteers to carry it across a parking lot. Forty-five managed. The rules marked them fit for work on the spot. Forty-five did not manage. The rules marked them unable to attend. Nobody got the exemption. The p-value is the chance you would see this result by luck. It is about zero.
I also ran a control group. The control group carried an empty binder. All 90 of them made it. This proves the problem is the binder and not the people. I include this so nobody can say I skipped a step.
Doyle Fenwick, a spokesman for the department, said the design was working as intended.
The binder was never meant to be carried. It was meant to be heavy. Those are two different goals and we met both.
Marisol Tate is a lawyer for the people who sued. She said her clients were relieved by the ruling. Several of them had already started training. One had been doing arm curls with a bag of flour because the binder was not out yet. She has told him he can stop.
What happens to the binders
The department says it will appeal. If it wins, the forklift moves and the pallets ship. I asked whether the test could be printed on fewer pages. Mr Fenwick said the weight was the point. I asked him to repeat that so I could write it down. He did.
The implications are, frankly, terrifying. A rule that nobody can pass is not a rule. It is a scale with a wall built on it. I have sent the department my full report. It runs to nine pages. I mailed it flat.
