It was March 2020, and Robert Gordon was about to kick some 80,000 people off health insurance.

As the Michigan state health director, he had just spent the past year, and some $30 million in state tax dollars, trying to avoid doing that very thing.

Gordon was a Democrat, a veteran of the Obama administration, and he didn’t want people to lose the coverage they had recently gained through the Affordable Care Act.

But Gordon and his boss, Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer, had reluctantly inherited a law passed two years earlier, when Republicans led the state. And that law mandated that Michigan institute work requirements for Medicaid on January 1, 2020.

Gordon and his team managed to determine that most enrollees were already meeting the law’s requirements, either because they we

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