There’s no evidence work requirements for Medicaid recipients will boost employment, but they are a key piece of Republican spending bill

The notion that people who get government benefits should prove that they deserve them, ideally through paid labor, is now centuries old. This conviction underlay the Victorian workhouses in 19th-century England that Charles Dickens critiqued through his novels…. In 1996, the Democratic Clinton administration replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, a long-standing entitlement to cash assistance for low-income families, with Temporary Aid for Needy Families, known commonly as TANF. The TANF program, as its name indicates, was limited to short-term support, with the expectation that most people getting these benefits would soon gain long-term employment.