Informing, Enrolling, and Reenrolling CalWORKs Leavers in Food Stamps and Medi-Cal

The federal 1996 welfare reforms were intended to move cash aid recipients into the workforce, while maintaining a set of "work supports", including Medicaid and Food Stamps. Given that those programs had primarily focused on non-working cash aid recipients and the large flow of people off the welfare roles in the mid-1990s, reorienting those programs to their new goals of serving the working poor would be a challenge. This paper considers how those changes were implemented in California