KY rep. says Medicaid recipients spend hours gaming. Experts say that’s not true
In a recent Fox News interview, Kentucky’s Republican Congressman Brett Guthrie said millions of able-bodied Americans on Medicaid are choosing not to work and instead spend “over six hours a day” playing video games and socializing.
“That’s just not fair,” said Guthrie, who chairs the U.S. Energy and Commerce Committee, where President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” originated.
That bill, which Guthrie champions, includes deep cuts to Medicaid, the federal government health insurance program covering approximately 78 million Americans, primarily low-income adults, children and people with disabilities.
More than 10 million people could lose their Medicaid coverage under Trump’s bill, according to estimations by the Congressional Budget Office.
One in three Kentuckians are on Medicaid.
“There are 4.8 million people receiving Medicaid,” Guthrie said. “These are people actually choosing not to work . . . there was an American Enterprise study that studied this group of people who are able-bodied, not working, said they spend over six hours a day on video games and socializing.”
Local and national health care policy and Medicaid experts said Guthrie’s statement is a gross exaggeration that relies on non-contextualized research.
Researchers with George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health published a rebuke of the study, saying it “distorts the truth in ways that could do real harm.”
Guthrie’s office did not return a Herald-Leader request for comment Wednesday.
AEI study ‘fundamentally flawed’
Trump’s budget reconciliation bill, which is awaiting a Senate vote, imposes community engagement and work requirements for able-bodied adults on Medicaid starting in 2027. An able-bodied adult is anyone between ages 18 and 64 who is not disabled and is deemed capable of working.
In order for able-bodied adults to meet the new community engagement requirements, one would need to spend 80 hours a month of working, going to school, participating in a work program or doing community service.
The American Enterprise Institute’s late May study that Guthrie referenced examines how many Medicaid recipients don’t currently comply with this new requirement by looking at two sets of data — the American Time Use Survey and the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement — and dividing people only into “disabled” and “non-disabled” categories.
Using these two categories, the study found that between 40% and 56% of “non-disabled” adults between ages 19 and 64 who don’t have kids, aren’t in school and who don’t work, spend 180 hours per month “relaxing,” Deputy Director of AEI’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility Kevin Corinth wrote.
AEI is a politically center-right think tank in Washington, D.C. that researchers government policies, economics and social welfare.
Activities considered “relaxing” in the survey including watching TV, playing video games, socializing and other leisure activities.
“Understanding how Medicaid recipients who will be subject to the new community engagement requirements spend their time provides a picture of how they might need to reallocate their time if they start working or more frequently engaging with the community,” he said.
But by only delineating between non-disabled and disabled adults, Corinth’s research implies, at least statistically, that all “non-disabled” adults on Medicaid who are “relaxing” must be able-bodied and otherwise capable of working — a point of fact that is incorrect, said Dustin Pugel, policy director at the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.
“The short version is that they used an overly narrow definition of ‘disabled’ and left out many people who are out of the labor force due to disability, or even working part time due to disability,” Pugel said.
“Obviously many of these folks are engaged in more ‘leisure’ time, which is just economic-speak for time not spent working a job. This doesn’t mean they’re not otherwise engaged with their church, neighborhood or other civic group, or helping care for a loved one.”
The study’s definition of disabled versus non-disabled is based on two factors: whether an individual receives supplemental security income or has a health condition preventing them from working, which Pugel called “overly narrow.”
Supplemental security income, or SSI, is reserved for the most impoverished adults, those with a disability or are age 65 or older, and they are among the federal benefits most difficult to qualify for. Roughly 7.4 million Americans received SSI in April 2025, according to the Pew Research Center.
As researchers with the Milken Institute at GWU point out in their rebuke of the AEI study, “In order to constrain its reach, the SSI program uses a definition of disability so severe that work must be virtually impossible for an individual to qualify (although some people who do receive SSI may be able to work in limited amounts in substantially supportive environments).”
To delineate only between this class of individuals and those who are able-bodied overlooks millions of low-income adults in the middle who may be able to do limited work because of a health issue but are not considered disabled enough to qualify them for SSI.
This “serious underestimation of disability among the population (Corinth) claims to analyze” is a “fundamental problem,” Milken Institute researchers said.
“For example, a 54-year-old woman with a serious heart condition may be able to work a few hours each week and therefore not be considered disabled for purposes of SSI; yet she may be seriously limited in how many hours she can work and may need a good deal of rest,” they wrote. “But ASEC data would consider her an able-bodied adult who is ‘relaxing.’
“Using her ‘leisure time’ to justify a work requirement grossly misrepresents her reality.”
The AEI study “results in a gross undercount of disability among a low-income adult population who experience a sufficient level of activity limitation to impair their ability to work,” they added. This broad-brushing is a “fundamental flaw . . . that makes its findings and conclusions virtually useless.”
Pugel agreed.
“The bottom line is that work reporting requirements often lead to people falling through the cracks, and the AEI study is a case-in-point of just that,” he said. “They let a lot of folks fall through the cracks of their study, and overstated the numbers. Imagine the harm that would come to folks if it was policy not just a study, and instead of being left out of a statistical sample they are left out of medical care.”
Beyond the flawed study Guthrie cited, census data from 2022 to 2024 showed that 51% of Kentucky adults on Medicaid under age 65 were working. And of the percentage that wasn’t working, 23% were engaged in their community in other ways, including caring for a loved one, child or aging parent or going to school, and 26% qualified as sick or disabled.
Nationwide in 2023, nearly two-thirds of adults ages 19-64 on Medicaid were working, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Close to “three in 10 were not working because of care-giving responsibilities, illness or disability, or due to school attendance — reasons that counted as qualifying exemptions from the work requirements under previous policies,” said KFF, a national health care policy research nonprofit.
But under Trump’s bill, “many more Medicaid enrollees who would remain eligible would be at risk of losing coverage because of the administrative burden and red tape related to reporting requirements,” KFF added.
Still, the narrative that a swath of able-bodied Americans receiving government assistance are regularly gaming the system — and that the GOP-backed bill won’t impact Americans on Medicaid who are meeting the necessary requirements — has been repeated by other Republicans, including in Kentucky’s federal delegation.
“Work-capable adults need to get off the taxpayer rolls and then they need to get into private health insurance and private employment,” Kentucky Congressman Andy Barr said in March. “What we need in this country is for the American people to get back to work.”
In February, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has also championed Trump’s budget bill, said it will not cut benefits “for people who rightly deserve them,” adding that Medicaid “is not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couches playing video games.”
Despite its inaccuracies, the AEI study was posted on the U.S. House Budget Committee’s official website June 4 as evidence why “the Medicaid program is broken, and the American public overwhelmingly supports an effective, mandatory work requirements for able-bodied adults receiving taxpayer-funded government benefits.”
