TOPEKA — Gov. Sam Brownback signed a bill Monday that reduces the amount of time people can receive cash assistance and imposes tighter work requirements for those people to remain eligible for the program.

“It’s encouraging people to get back into the workforce sooner,” Brownback said during a bill-signing ceremony in his office.

The bill is an extension of a welfare reform bill lawmakers enacted last year called the Hope, Opportunity and Prosperity for Everyone, or “HOPE” Act, which drew national attention for limiting the types of purchases welfare recipients could make using electronic debit cards.

Under current law, there is a lifetime limit of 36 months for people to receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Family benefits, or TANF. That can be extended to 48 months under certain hardship conditions.

Senate Bill 402, which its supporters call “HOPE Act 2.0,” reduces that limit to 24 months, with possible hardship extensions to 36 months.

The bill requires stricter verification of all adults living in a household that receives TANF benefits and says an entire family becomes ineligible if one adult in the household has reached his or her 24-month limit.

It also tightens requirements that able-bodied adults receiving assistance must either be actively seeking employment or be enrolled in a work training program.

The law provides an exemption from the work requirement for people taking care of an infant less than 3 months of age, but it also provides that the exemption does not apply if at least one adult in the household has exhausted the 24-month lifetime limit for TANF.

It also requires the Department for Children and Families to verify the identity of all adults living in a household where any adult receives TANF benefits, and provides that people can lose their eligibility if they do not cooperate in a welfare fraud investigation.

In addition, it requires monthly reporting of all people claiming monthly Lottery winnings of $5,000 or more so DCF can check those names against the list of people receiving public assistance and determine whether they are still eligible.

“Most importantly, the HOPE Act is about bringing people out of poverty, giving them the training and the job assistance to get them out of poverty,” said Rep. Dan Hawkins, R-Wichita, who chairs the House Health and Human Services Committee.

The bill also repeals one of the more controversial provisions of last year’s legislation, which said TANF recipients could not withdraw more than $25 a day from an ATM machine using their electronic benefits cards. Because most ATM machines do not dispense $5 bills, that effectively limited them to $20 per day.

Meanwhile, critics of the HOPE Act say it has failed to achieve its goals, noting that while the number of people receiving public assistance has declined, there has been no corresponding decrease in the Kansas childhood poverty rate.

“The so-called HOPE Act hurts the poorest families in Kansas,” said Shannon Cotsoradis, the outgoing executive director of Kansas Action for Children. “Even parents who have found jobs may not be earning enough to feed their families. Cutting off critical lifelines to Kansas’ most economically fragile children merely perpetuates the cycle of poverty that the governor claims to be committed to reducing.”

She said more than 900 Kansas children have lost access to cash assistance since the first HOPE Act went into effect in January, limiting lifetime benefits to 36 months, and that more children will lose access when the new law takes effect.

DCF officials estimated the new law will reduce the TANF rolls by 424 households in its first year. There are currently about 4,900 households enrolled in the TANF program.

Step therapy

In addition to the welfare-reform provisions, the bill signed into law Monday also limits the access of Medicaid patients to certain high cost prescription drugs, including mental health drugs, when lower-cost drugs in the same category are available.

That provision, known as “step therapy,” says that in most cases, patients must try lower-cost drugs that are on the state’s preferred drug list for at least three months before they can move to the more expensive drugs, even when their doctor specifically prescribes the more expensive medication.

Until now, Kansas was one of only a handful of states that did not use preferred drug lists or step therapy for mental health drugs, including expensive antipsychotic medications, which are the single most expensive class of drugs in the Medicaid program.

Supporters of that provision, though, say it will mean substantial savings for the state, including $10 million just in the first fiscal year, a savings that was built into the budget bill that is still awaiting Brownback’s signature.