Sandra Lomeli testifies at a public hearing April 10, 2025, against a bill imposing new restrictions on the process for confirming eligibility for Medicaid. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

Legislation that would add new restrictions to the process of qualifying for Medicaid is on hold in the Wisconsin Capitol after meeting with resounding opposition at an Assembly hearing less than a week ago.

At a meeting Tuesday to vote on two other bills, State Rep. Dan Knodl (R-Germantown) told the Assembly Committee on Public Benefit Reform that he chairs that the Medicaid measure “has some work to be done yet.”

The bill’s author, Rep. William Penterman (R-Columbus), told the Wisconsin Examiner in an email message Tuesday that the legislation “is still in the Assembly Committee on Public Benefit Reform. The conversation on how to improve the bill is ongoing.”

An opponent of the measure, however, suggested that opposition testimony had prevailed in keeping it from moving forward.

“I think you all realized how terrible and harmful that legislation was,” said committee member Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-Milwaukee), directing his comment at his four Republican colleagues. “We heard two and a half hours of testimony overwhelmingly against that [bill].”

Clancy spoke before voting against two other bills that the committee passed 4-2 along party lines — one making sweeping revisions to Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance (UI) system, and the other barring local governments from instituting guaranteed basic income programs using tax dollars. 

Recipients marshal opposition to Medicaid measure

Medicaid covers acute and long-term medical care for low-income people as well as people with disabilities. It’s funded jointly with federal and state money and managed by the state under federal rules and guidelines.

With some exceptions, recipients must have incomes at or below the federal poverty guideline. Most Medicaid recipients must be reviewed once a year to confirm they are still eligible for the program.

AB 163 would direct the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) to conduct eligibility reviews every six months.

It also would add restrictions on the verification process — forbidding the state from automatically renewing Medicaid beneficiaries, forbidding the state from automatically filling in electronic forms with the recipient’s information except for their name and address, and cutting off a person’s ability to enroll in Medicaid for six months for failing to report a change that might make them ineligible.

Penterman, the only witness who testified at the bill’s April 10 public hearing, highlighted the statistic that 20% of Wisconsin residents are on Medicaid. 

He described the legislation as an effort to “reassess and restore integrity to the system by ensuring that only those who are truly needy and truly qualified for this coverage receive benefits.”

But the recurring message from a stream of hearing witnesses — the vast majority of them people with disabilities who rely on Medicaid for long-term health care in their homes or in the community or their family caregivers — was that the current eligibility requirements are already burdensome, and strict enough to keep out people who aren’t eligible.

“We heard from so many people who do a tremendous amount of work to prove to the state that they have low enough income, low enough assets, that they are who they say they are, that they meet the functional screen and all of the other requirements that the department has [for them] to be able to get in or stay in the program,” said Tamara Jackson, legislative policy representative for the Wisconsin Board of People with Developmental Disabilities, in an interview Tuesday.

The hearing came just two days after the bill was introduced April 8. Its fast track prompted an overnight opposition campaign by Medicaid recipients.

“We heard from people across the state who had said that they had contacted their state lawmakers about this particular bill and had really used it as an opportunity to tell them what they do to be allowed in the Medicaid program,” Jackson said.

Federal Medicaid debate draws attention

Recent Congressional action on federal legislation to extend tax cuts enacted in 2017 has included spending targets that would appear to make Medicaid reductions inevitable. Medicaid recipients have been following those debates and making public appeals to oppose cuts in the program — priming them to oppose the state proposal as well.

“I think that people are paying attention, and the reason there were so many contacts is because Medicaid is so important to folks and they’re willing to show up and talk about it,” Jackson said.

At the very start of the April 10 hearing, Penterman alluded to communications he had already received from advocates and said he planned an amendment to exempt people with developmental disabilities from some of the bill’s restrictions. He introduced the amendment later that day.

Several witnesses, however, criticized limiting the amendment to people with developmental disabilities, arguing that the bill’s requirements would be needlessly onerous for many other people.

Sandra Lomeli of Pewaukee was one of the hearing witnesses against the Medicaid bill. She is the mother of two adult children with severe disabilities who are able to get long-term care through Medicaid. One requires 24-hour care as a sexual assault survivor, she said.

Lomeli is also covered by BadgerCare Plus, the Wisconsin Medicaid plan for primary and specialty health care and hospitalization, because being her children’s family caregiver limits her working hours to a part-time nonprofit position.

She told the committee that she fills both sides of a ream’s worth of forms each year to confirm her children’s Medicaid eligibility. She said she spends 54 hours completing those forms and 10 hours confirming her own eligibility each year.

In her testimony Lomeli challenged lawmakers to enlist Medicaid participants and advocates if they wanted to write legislation to improve the program.

It appeared to Lomeli that her suggestion “took people by surprise that we would even be at the table,” she said in an interview Tuesday. “I don’t think they valued that we could add value — because if they did, somebody would have reached out.”

She said she doesn’t consider the legislation dead, however, which concerns her.

“The issue is not off the table yet,” Lomeli said. “They’re just going to reword it. We have won the battle now. We haven’t won the war.

UI change, basic-income ban, both pass on party lines

While setting the Medicaid bill aside Tuesday, the Committee on Public Benefit Reform advanced two others with only Republican votes.

AB 164 would rename Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance system as a “re-employment assistance” program with new requirements for workers and for the state agency that administers it.

Those include requiring recipients, who must currently make four work searches a week, to make two of those in the form of direct contacts with prospective employers. It also adds a variety of additional counseling procedures and requirements for people who receive unemployment benefits.

Department of Workforce Development Secretary-designee Amy Pechacek submitted written testimony expressing “concerns about this proposal due to the anticipated reporting burden for employers, potential costs, bureaucratic requirements, and lack of sustainable funding.”

Gov. Tony Evers vetoed similar legislation in 2023, citing similar complaints as well as the fact that it did not go through the state’s joint labor-management unemployment advisory council.

AB 165 would bar local governments from using tax dollars to create guaranteed income programs without a work or training requirement. Evers vetoed a similar bill to that one in 2023 as well, on the grounds it usurped local control. 

Rep. Christian Phelps (D-Eau Claire) made the same argument against the current legislation.

Knodl defended the both bills as helping to “protect the integrity of these systems, and that’s important if we want them to be sustainable in the future.”

Clancy argued that both should have been put on pause along with the Medicaid bill.

“But all three of those . . . bills are fundamentally the same,” Clancy said. “They are kicking people when they are down. They are hitting people at their most vulnerable, and frankly, in 2025, when national and state Republican policies have meant that people have more needs. We should not be attacking those social safety nets.”

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State Rep. Jerry O'Connor gives testimony in favor of a bill that would require state agencies to report on various metrics for training and workforce development programs they supervise. (Screenshot/WisEye)

Republicans in the state Legislature are taking another run at changes to unemployment insurance and workforce programs in Wisconsin that Gov. Tony Evers vetoed in August 2023.

While sponsors of the bills cited a couple of modifications in some measures, they are for the most part unchanged, they said during public hearings Wednesday for four bills in the Assembly’s labor committee.

One, AB 162, would require state agencies to compile a series of metrics on training and workforce development programs under their supervision, including the unemployment rates and median earnings of participants six months after they graduate from a program.

“We want to make certain our money’s being spent in a way that generates a positive beneficial return both for taxpayers and for the individuals participating in the programs,” said state Rep. Jerry O’Connor (R-Fond du Lac), testifying in favor of the bill. “We’d look at the percent of individuals enrolled in training programs who obtained a measurable skill gain.”

O’Connor said the bill draws its performance measures from the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), a federal workforce training law updated in 2014.

In vetoing the version of the bill that passed the last session of the Legislature, Evers said that many state programs it covered didn’t fit with WIOA’s reporting structure and “have separate requirements under current state law.”

Three other bills would impose tighter restrictions on the unemployment insurance (UI) system.

AB 167 would expand the definition of employee misconduct that would be grounds for denying an unemployment insurance claim as well as for a worker’s compensation claim. The bill would also require DWD to conduct random audits of 50% of all work searches reported by people claiming UI.

AB 168 would extend the statute of limitations for prosecuting felony fraudulent UI claims to eight years. It would also require the state Department of Workforce Development (DWD) to produce more training materials for employers and UI claimants, operate a call center and expand its hours in times of higher volume, check various state and national databases to verify that UI applicants qualify, and implement “identity-proofing” measures.

AB 169 would penalize UI recipients who do not show up for a job interview they have been granted or a job they’ve been offered — “commonly referred to as ghosting,” said state Rep. Dan Knodl (R-Germantown), the bill’s author.

A UI recipient who fails to respond to an interview request or job offer, fails to report for a scheduled job interview or who is not available to return to work at their previous job would lose unemployment benefits for the week in which that occurred. The bill does not impose the penalty for the first offense.

State Rep. Joan Fitzgerald (D-Fort Atkinson) asked Knodl whether the bill had gone through the state’s Unemployment Insurance Advisory Council. The joint labor-management body revises the state’s UI law every two years. In the past Evers has vetoed UI proposals for not going through the council. 

“This is one of those that they’re not going to visit,” Knodl said. “So that’s why we’re here as a stand-alone bill.”

Nobody testified against the bills Wednesday, but Victor Forberger, a Madison attorney who represents people with UI claims, sent the committee a four-page memo opposing them. He wrote that DWD already does most of what AB 168 would require, and that it would “hamstring” the department “when new practices and resources emerge.”

The measures “will do nothing to make unemployment more useful and efficient for Wisconsin workers and employers,” Forberger wrote.

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Wisconsin Republicans introduced new bills targeting transgender youth last week after President Donald Trump signed several related executive orders. People gather in New Orleans for Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31, 2023. (Photo by Greg LaRose/Louisiana Illuminator)

Wisconsin Republicans are again turning their focus towards LGBTQ+ youth, especially those who are transgender, introducing bills that would prohibit gender-affirming care for youth, ban students from playing on certain sports teams and mandate that school districts get permission from parents when using different names and pronouns for students. 

The four bills come as President Donald Trump has signed a slate of executive orders targeting transgender people. The bills have received pushback from the Wisconsin Legislative LGBTQ+ Caucus, the Transgender Parent and Non-Binary Advocacy Caucus and LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations. 

Sen. Mark Spreitzer (D-Beloit), chair of the LGBTQ+ caucus, told the Wisconsin Examiner that the bills are “part of broader national Republican effort” to attack trans people. 

“Republicans are now trying to essentially legislate trans people out of existence by denying medically necessary life-saving care, by preventing people from playing team sports, by trying to make it harder for people to be called by the name and pronouns that they go by when they’re in school,” Spreitzer said. 

Targeting transgender athletes

The first two bills would ban transgender girls in Wisconsin K-12 schools and transgender women attending UW System schools and Wisconsin technical colleges from participating on teams that reflect their gender identity. 

The bills’ introduction followed the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association decision in early February to change its policy, which previously permitted transgender athletes to compete on teams consistent with their gender identity. In response to an executive order signed by Trump, the new policy prohibits an athlete from competing on a team that does not match the biological sex that they were assigned when they were born.

“Working in consultation with legal counsel, our Board updated this policy to ensure clarity is provided to our membership as they work to comply with new federal guidance from the White House,” Stephanie Hauser, executive director of the WIAA, said in a statement. 

The WIAA’s decision was celebrated by Reps. Barbara Dittrich (R-Oconomowoc) and Dan Knodl (R-Germantown), who have led unsuccessful efforts in the Legislature to restrict what teams transgender athletes play on for many years. The lawmakers said in a column that they would reintroduce a bill “to secure women’s and girls’ rights in Wisconsin.”

FAIR Wisconsin Executive Director Abigail Swetz said in a statement that sports should be an inclusive space for youth. 

“When an athlete gets to play sports on a team where they belong, that can make such a huge difference, and that is especially true for our trans athletes when the trans community is under attack from a hostile federal government. Now is the time to show our trans kids love and support, not exclusion,” Swetz said. “Our trans kids and young adults, and all trans Wisconsinites, need to know that there are so many people in this state who love you exactly as you are. The fact that a few members of the Wisconsin legislature want to play political games with your joy is inappropriate.” 

Swetz said in an email to the Wisconsin Examiner that the decisions by lawmakers and by the WIAA are examples of the power that the Trump administration is trying to exert on policies at all levels, “using their platform in a calculated, chaotic, and hateful way.”

“There is so much a federal administration cannot do, but let’s be real here, this administration is trying to govern by executive overreach, and although I do not think they will succeed in changing many federal laws, there is power in their federal agencies and also in their significant use of the very loud microphone at their disposal,” Swetz said.

The anti-trans orders “will undoubtedly create a chilling effect of pre-compliance,” Swetz added. “We cannot allow obedience in advance, although we’re already seeing it; the WIAA ruling is a disappointing example of pre-compliance, and it’s frankly antithetical to the values WIAA espouses.”

Gender-affirming care for minors

Another bill — coauthored by Sen. Cory Tomczyk (R-Mosinee), Rep. Scott Allen (R-Waukesha), Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) — would ban gender- affirming care for people under the age of 18. It would prohibit health care providers from engaging in or making referrals for medical intervention “if done for the purpose of changing the minor’s body to correspond to a sex that is discordant with the minor’s biological sex,” including prescribing puberty-blocking drugs or gender-affirming surgery for minors.

“Our children are not experiments and parents should not be scared or pressured into having their children receive non-medically necessary drugs or irreversible procedures before their brains are fully developed,” the authors wrote in a memo. 

Health care providers under the bill could be investigated and have their licenses revoked by the Board of Nursing, the Medical Examining Board and the Physician Assistant Affiliated Credentialing Board if there are allegations that they have provided this type of care to a minor.

Following an executive order by Trump to withhold funds from medical institutions that provide gender affirming care and to require federal health programs to exclude coverage of gender-affirming surgeries and hormone treatments for young people by 2026, Children’s Wisconsin hospital paused gender-affirming care for teens. The hospital reinstated the practice.

Spreitzer called the bill the “cruelest” of the proposals. 

“Republicans are touting this idea that kids shouldn’t make permanent medical decisions until they’re 18,” Spreitzer said. “There are plenty of permanent medical decisions that need to be made before the age of 18 because of different conditions, and that’s why doctors exist.”

He added that such decisions “should be made between doctors, parents and the affected young people, based on medical necessity, based on rigorous medical evaluation, and politicians should not be inserting themselves into that.”

Spreitzer said that medications to delay puberty are intended to give young people the chance to grow up and potentially be able to make additional medical decisions once they turn 18. He said that banning them could create significant psychological harm and leave permanent physical effects that may require additional medical interventions in the future that wouldn’t have been necessary if they’ve been able to take puberty blockers. 

The process for gender affirming care is lengthy and is a decision that includes the child, their families and health providers, including mental health providers, and gender affirming care before 18 mostly focuses on pubertal suppression or hormone therapy.

Studies have found that de-transitioning is quite rare, according to the Human Rights Campaign, and one study found that transgender youth who start hormones with their parents’ assistance before age 18 years are less likely to detransition compared with those that start as adults.

Spreitzer noted that those under 18 who have been receiving care would also have to stop receiving it. The bill would include a six-month period before it goes into effect which would be meant for health care providers to discontinue care for minor patients 

“People are going to essentially be told in six months you’re going to have to stop taking medications you’re currently on, and you’re going to have to go through puberty as a sex that you don’t identify with. That is going to create incredible trauma for those young people,” Spreitzer said.

Names and pronouns

The fourth bill introduced last week would require school districts to implement policies stating that parents determine the names and pronouns used by school staff. The proposed policies must require a parent’s written authorization for school employees to use something different. 

The bill includes an exception if a nickname is a shortened version of a student’s legal first or middle name.

Bill authors Dittrich and Sen. Andre Jacque (R-New Franken) said the legislation is in response to parents feeling like schools are excluding them. The bill was modeled after a policy implemented by Arrowhead High School in 2022, even as there was some pushback from students and families.

“Its intent is not to punish children or eliminate their ‘safe spaces,’” the bill authors wrote in a memo. “Instead, the goal is to ensure transparency and prevent school district employees from withholding or, in some cases, encouraging life-changing decisions regarding a child’s sexuality or gender identity without parental involvement.” 

Spreitzer said the bill was poorly drafted. Besides “making it just harder for trans students to be called by the name and pronouns that they use in everyday life, it would really put school districts in a ridiculous position,” he said. 

“People go by all sorts of nicknames in everyday life — maybe it’s a version of their last name, maybe it’s a totally different name. It’s not as simple as just a shortened version of your first or middle name for everybody,” Spretizer said. “This is the Legislature trying to micromanage decisions that are made in everyday life without great controversy, and inserting itself into every school district, and I think it just would have absolutely absurd effects that the authors have not even thought of.” 

Spreitzer said bills targeting transgender youth are not particularly new in Wisconsin. He noted that in 2011 a bill that would have restricted bathroom use for transgender people was introduced, but it never got to then-Gov. Scott Walker’s desk. 

“It’s obviously become more front and center, just seeing how early in the legislative session these are being put out, and how much of coordinated effort there seems to be with bills coming out three different days this week, all attacking trans people,” Spreitzer said. 

Spreitzer said that even in the current national political environment, advocates opposed to such legislation are in a stronger position than in the past. Gov. Tony Evers has vetoed similar legislation in the past and has pledged to continue vetoing such legislation, he noted. The Legislature’s LGBTQ+ caucus has a record number of members this year — 12 lawmakers from across the state including Eau Claire, Appleton, Ashland and Green Bay.

“While we are deeply concerned about what’s coming down from Washington DC, we are in a very strong position to not only stop attacks on the LGBTQ+ community here in Wisconsin, but hopefully in two years, to be in a majority and be able to pass proactive legislation and protect equality,” Spreitzer said.

Swetz told the Wisconsin Examiner that FAIR Wisconsin will continue working with local, state and federal elected officials to strengthen protections for LGTBQ+ people. 

“I think fear is understandable. There is a lot that’s uncertain. I’m scared, too. I also think we have to remember that the LGBTQ+ community has always faced hostility, often from the government, and we are still here,” Swetz wrote. “This is a moment to organize and mobilize and most importantly, to take care of ourselves and our community.”

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