Medicaid's new work-rule deadline hits before courts decide who's medically frail enough to skip it.

…(cont) Hospitals have run a version of that arithmetic on themselves. In July, Rochester's hospital system moved to cut deep into its own employees' health benefits — the same kind of coverage squeeze now written into federal rule. The nurses' union stood with its nonunion coworkers, the cuts stopped, and by month's end those coworkers had voted to join the union themselves. An industry about to spend weeks processing exemption paperwork for its patients spent the summer narrowing its own staff's coverage the same way Washington is narrowing "medically frail."

That arithmetic has an audience now. On September 16, the Disability Justice and Rights Caucus of Workers World Party endorsed a national day of action for September 19, joining a call from a group naming itself the Nonviolent Medicaid Army for demonstrations in fifteen states. What showed up on the day is not in this paper's file.

What is in the file is the gap, and it is not subtle. Congress wrote an exemption. The administration wrote a narrower one, and is being sued over it. Hospitals wrote a deadline around both versions, with fifty days left to guess which one a court leaves standing. Fifty days is not long enough to litigate a definition of "frail." It is exactly long enough to process one.