The paper form was three pages long. Luke Seaborn filled it out twice—carefully, with a mechanic’s steady hand—before learning there was a fourth page online he’d missed.
“They asked for the same information in a different format,” he said. “It caught me off guard.”
His Medicaid coverage was canceled that week.
Seaborn, 54, restores vintage cars outside Macon. For a while, he told friends that Georgia’s new “Pathways” program was something to be grateful for. It covered checkups, prescriptions, and the physical therapy he needed after slipping in the garage last winter.
But by spring, he wouldn’t even say the name.
“The 80-hours rule feels like another full-time job just to prove you’re working.”
The idea behind work requirements sounds simple: tie benefits to effort.
“These programs are designed to encourage independence,” said Georgia Department of Community Health spokesperson Carla Moore. “We believe tying support to effort builds long-term self-sufficiency.”
But in practice, it acts more like a stress test—measuring not who’s lazy, but who has time, bandwidth, and a printer. What slips through are the people least able to prove their worth on paper: caregivers, the chronically sick, people juggling low-wage gigs with no fixed hours. The ones who miss a form.
In Arkansas, over 18,000 people lost Medicaid within months of a new hours rule. Courts later blocked the policy. But coverage didn’t return automatically. Researchers found no rise in employment. Just thousands of vanished names.
In Virginia, SNAP participation dropped 53% among adults subject to similar rules. Employment? Still flat.