Six public health professors urged a federal court to overturn a decision allowing a state to impose Medicaid work requirements in an amicus curiae brief, according to a University release Thursday.

The brief, filed in a case before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, encourages the court to declare unconstitutional Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar’s decision to allow New Hampshire to require Medicaid recipients to work at least 25 hours a week. Six Milken Institute School of Public Health professors joined four faculty members at schools like Boston and New York universities in filing the “friend-of-the-court” brief.

Professors in the brief argue that New Hampshire’s policy would discriminate against older and lower-income individuals by stripping between 15,000 and 23,000 Medicaid recipients of health care coverage in its first year, according to the release.

“Like Arkansas and Kentucky, the New Hampshire program lacks the requisite elements of sound social policy research; the administration has unlawfully deployed experimental authority simply to strip the poor of health insurance,” said Sara Rosenbaum, the Harold and Jane Hirsh professor of health law and policy and one of the individuals who co-signed onto the brief, in the release.

An amicus brief allows individuals who are not a party to a court case to submit information or expertise about the case to the court. The 10 professors, associate deans and deans who submitted the brief are represented by the D.C. law firm Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell, LLP.