There are many reasons to be concerned about the Republican budget bill that passed the House and is currently being taken up by the Senate.

Perhaps chief among them are the $625 billion in cuts to Medicaid that, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, will cause 7.6 million Americans to lose their health insurance over the next 10 years. There are also new rules such as work requirements that are touted as ways to save money by reducing Medicaid rolls. Maine Sen. Susan Collins has said she’s open to “sensible work requirements.”

Here’s the problem: work requirements don’t work.

Arkansas imposed work requirements in 2018. A paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that in just the first six months, there was a 6.8 percentage point drop in Medicaid enrollment and a 4 percentage point increase in the number of uninsured. There was no significant change in employment, and they found that 95%+ of the 17,000 people dropped already met the work requirement or should have been exempt. The authors attribute the drop in Medicaid enrollment to people not being able to figure out the bureaucratic reporting obstacles.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reports that a Georgia program establishing work requirements also did not work, and that such requirements are “simply a way to keep people from getting health care by requiring them to navigate a complicated system to report work hours or claim exemptions.”

Work requirements are rooted in the age-old conservative trope that people receiving government benefits sit around all day doing nothing. In fact, the Kaiser Family Foundation says, 46% of Maine Medicaid recipients work full time and 26% work part time. National figures indicate that those who don’t work are caregivers, have an illness or disability, are attending school, or are retired.

Here in Maine, roughly 1 in 4 of the people you pass in the street or see in the store or sit next to in church depend on Medicaid. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that 33-48% of them are at risk of losing their coverage. That’s 69,626 to 101,273 of your friends and neighbors. Not only will they lose care, but without Medicaid reimbursements, Maine will lose hospital services and lose entire hospitals (like Inland Hospital in Waterville, gone already).

The cuts and rules are being sold as going after “waste, fraud and abuse,” but here’s how you can tell that’s not the case: they haven’t identified $625 billion of waste, fraud and abuse. They haven’t said that’s how much waste, fraud and abuse there is. They just picked a number to plug into the bill to counterbalance the $7 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires.

Is there waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid? Undoubtedly, though, as the Kaiser Family Foundation reports, “What is known about fraud in Medicaid is that it’s not unique to Medicaid (fraud also occurs in Medicare and private health insurance) and is mostly committed by providers.” But the budget bill does nothing to identify fraud and get rid of it. Would getting rid of every bit of it save $625 billion? Not likely.

I hope that Sen. Collins and others will not be taken in by the work requirement myth. As I said at the top, there are many reasons to oppose the budget bill. This is just one of the more obvious.