Thoughts on Healthcare Markets & Technology

Thoughts on Healthcare Markets & Technology

The Exemption Machine: the Medicaid work requirement business nobody has built, why it fits a $5M preseed and a $25M seed, and the contract by contract plan to get there before January 1, 2027

Aug 28, 2026
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🎧 Podcast episode for paid subscribers only. Also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Thoughts on Healthcare Markets & Technology
The Exemption Machine: the Medicaid work requirement business nobody has built, why it fits a $5M preseed and a $25M seed, and the contract by contract plan to get there before January 1, 2027
Starting Jan 1, 2027, ~18.5 million Medicaid expansion adults must prove 80 hours/month of community engagement or a medical exemption or lose coverage. Federal projections put disenrollment in the millions. Most of those losses are paperwork failures, not job gains…
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Table of Contents

  1. Why this and why now

  2. The mandate with the abandoned supply

  3. What the business actually does

  4. Sizing it without lying

  5. Who pays and why they pay

  6. The preseed: five million dollars and twelve months

  7. Weeks one through eight

  8. Months three through six

  9. Months seven through twelve

  10. The milestones that unlock the mega seed

  11. What the twenty five million buys

  12. Where it breaks

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Abstract

  • Starting January 1, 2027, all states that have adopted the ACA Medicaid expansion (or equivalent expansion coverage) must condition Medicaid coverage for applicable expansion adults on 80 hours per month of qualifying community engagement activity or a documented exemption, with some states, including Nebraska, authorized to implement earlier at state option.

  • The interim final rule interprets the medical frailty exemption as a clinical determination tied to functional impairment rather than a simple diagnosis code lookup, and no organization in the ecosystem is currently staffed to produce those determinations at the required scale.

  • The business is a tech enabled clinical exemption and reinstatement service sold on contingency to FQHCs, community behavioral health providers, hospitals, and managed care plans, structurally modeled on the SSDI advocacy and hospital eligibility vendor industries.

  • The addressable pool is roughly 18.5 million subject enrollees, several million of whom have qualifying conditions, with a per member value to the payer of roughly $6,000 to $8,000 a year in capitation and a per member value to providers measured in avoided bad debt.

  • A $5 million preseed should buy three early state beachheads, twenty thousand completed determinations, a measured exemption rate, a reinstatement win rate, and signed contingency contracts with a dozen provider organizations and one plan before the national go live date.

  • The $25 million seed funds the expansion to all applicable expansion states in the first half of 2027, when the disenrollment wave actually hits and every plan and health system finance chief is suddenly reading the rule.

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