11. Few of the recipients leave the rolls and return to work. 12. Gov. George Pataki, in his welfare reform proposal, has pledged to allow recipients to keep their Medicaid health insurance for a year after they leave the rolls. 13. Her weekly profile of a welfare family is designed, in part, to help the state recruit mentors to work with those leaving the rolls. 14. If she leaves the rolls, her family will only be guaranteed health benefits for six months. 15. In more than a third of those cases, the families left the rolls for employment. 16. Indeed, if anything, it offers a best-case look at the prospects of those now leaving the rolls. 17. Of those who have left the rolls, city officials cannot say how many have found work. 18. Otherwise, they said, the poor would lack the motivation to leave the rolls. 19. Recipients would lose their Medicaid health care coverage when they leave the rolls, relegating many to seek treatment in the emergency rooms of public hospitals. 20. So the only study underway now tracks teen-agers who have left the rolls, and the preliminary results are troubling. |