Sick should work on farms to avoid losing Medicaid: Trump's agriculture secretary

Trump's agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, doubled down in a Fox Business interview on Tuesday on prior comments that people at risk of losing their health coverage due to new Medicaid restrictions should just go work on farms.

"You've suggested that Medicaid people, if they got a work requirement under the new rules, they should go work on farms," said Stuart Varney. "Are you sticking with that?"

"Here's the deal — when in America did we lose the concept of the dignity of work? So yes," replied Rollins.

Republicans have frequently touted the new mandate in Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" for states to adopt work requirements for Medicaid coverage, hopeful that this will be more popular among voters than other cuts made to the program.

In practice, nearly every working-age, non-disabled, childless adult on Medicaid — the only people to whom the work requirements will apply — already have jobs and those who do not live in extreme poverty. Previous states which experimented with Medicaid work requirements found massive increases in the cost of managing the program, and threw thousands of people who met the requirements off their insurance because of paperwork errors, all without any measurable boost to the labor force.

Indeed, experts have speculated that some states will simply cancel their Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act altogether, rather than go through the headache of trying to implement work requirement systems.

But Rollins has routinely pushed the idea work requirements could unlock all 34 million working-age non-disabled Medicaid recipients to do farm work, as a replacement for the millions of migrant farm workers the Trump administration is deporting.

Rollins also came under fire in March when she suggested, during a severe egg shortage triggered by a bird flu outbreak, that people unhappy with skyrocketing egg prices should raise their own backyard chickens.

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