Medicaid programs in every state have received one million free prescriptions of the blood thinner Eliquis since a drugmaker’s pricing deal with Washington took effect, the White House said this week. The prescriptions cost the programs nothing to fill because Bristol Myers Squibb agreed months ago to hand the pills to state Medicaid programs at…

Two federal safety-net programs are about to share the same yardstick. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services built a bridge into the new Medicaid work requirement that lets a household already proving compliance with food stamp or welfare work rules skip a second round of the same paperwork with a different agency. It is…

Starting January 1, 2027, most working-age adults on Medicaid’s expansion coverage will have to log 80 hours a month of work, school, training or volunteer service to keep their coverage. One category is carved out of that math entirely: a veteran whose VA disability rating sits at 100 percent, whether the rating is permanent or…

Nebraska’s food benefits program is not adding candy to its list of banned purchases on November 1, 2026, the date state officials spent more than a year building toward. A federal court threw out the entire waiver that would have made that change possible, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture has not brought it back.…

Starting November 4, 2026, a small grocery, corner store or rural gas station that wants to keep swiping Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefit cards has to clear a far higher bar than in past years. Federal regulators have rewritten the shelf-stocking floor for every authorized retailer except specialty shops, and the new math lands on…

Every Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program household in the 48 states and the District of Columbia gets a new maximum monthly benefit on October 1, 2026, but the increase stops responding to household size once a household reaches 18 people. A household of exactly 18 and a household of 40 draw from the same ceiling: $3,887…

A stolen debit card usually means a same-day fraud alert, a canceled number and a new card within a few business days. A stolen Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program card no longer works that way when the money behind it is federal. Congress let the law that reimbursed states for skimmed SNAP benefits lapse at the…

A provision inside the tax-and-spending law President Trump signed on July 4, 2025 rewrote who counts as an eligible immigrant under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The change touches neither work requirements nor benefit amounts nor income tests — it touches a single question: who qualifies at all. Guidance the Food and Nutrition Service issued…

Every dollar a state spends processing a SNAP application, staffing a call center or replacing a lost or stolen benefits card has been split with the federal government for decades, roughly half and half. That arrangement changes on October 1, when the federal reimbursement rate for those administrative costs drops from 50 percent to 25…

A birthday that used to mean nothing more than a bigger cake now carries a paperwork consequence inside the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Federal law changed this year the age at which a parent’s youngest child stops shielding that parent from SNAP’s work-hour rules, cutting the threshold from 18 down to 14. A household that…