Author ORCID iD
0000-0001-8904-2140
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-2020
Abstract
Medicaid’s cooperative federalism structure gives states significant discretion to include or exclude various categories of immigrants. This has created extreme geographic variability in immigrants’ access to health coverage. This Article describes federalism’s role in influencing state policies on immigrant eligibility for Medicaid and its implications for national health policy. Although there are disagreements over the extent to which public funds should be used to subsidize immigrant health coverage, this Article reveals that decentralized policymaking on immigrant access to Medicaid has weakened national health policy. It has failed to incentivize the type of state policy experimentation and replication that justifies federalism arrangements in other contexts. Rather, federalism has (1) enabled states to enact exclusionary policies that are ineffective and inhumane and (2) created barriers for states to enact inclusionary policies that advance the normative goals of health policy. This Article concludes that immigrant access to health coverage is best addressed through centralized policymaking.
This Article contributes to scholarly conversations about federalism and health care by providing a case study to test the efficacy of federalism arrangements in achieving equity for those who were left behind by health reform. More broadly, it adds to the federalism literature by synthesizing insights from three fields that rarely comment on one another: health law, immigration law, and federalism theory.
Publication Title
New York University Law Review
Recommended Citation
Medha D. Makhlouf, Laboratories of Exclusion: Medicaid, Federalism & Immigrants, 95 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1680 (2020).