The risks to our health

Extending health insurance to hundreds of thousands of poor Arkansans with the private option is more important than Planned Parenthood’s right to hire a half-dozen employees at $12 an hour for a short time.

These temporary workers would get federal passed-through dollars to do what Planned Parenthood is going to do admirably on its own anyway. That is to inform people of their new health-insurance opportunities beginning in October under the Affordable Care Act.

Our state’s innovative private-option form of adapted Medicaid expansion represents major human advancement. Denying Planned Parenthood a few pass-through federal dollars to hire a half-dozen “navigators” is an eminently silly and dismissible affront by Republican state legislators.

But the private option is not more important than general public aid to Planned Parenthood’s broad role in providing reproductive and other health services to poor women, including abortion counseling.

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Fortunately, that is not at risk in this current mini-debate.

It conceivably could become at risk, though, if the Beebe administration were to insist on including Planned Parenthood among the contractors for hiring a mere carload of these “navigators,” or if Planned Parenthood were to sue if turned down.

That might rile Republican legislators, who, because of how Arkansas people misvoted in the last election, hold the majority, like it or not.

We conceivably could end up without either health insurance for the poor or state-approved grants for Planned Parenthood’s vital services to poor women, such as cancer screenings and STD prevention.

That is to say that small and spiteful Republicans could turn against the private option-and not give it another three-fourths majority vote in the fiscal session next year-if it got gummed up in the abortion issue. Then they might actually pass a dubious bill that got introduced last time to deny any state money to Planned Parenthood for any of its important services.

The theory widely held among Republicans is that all money to Planned Parenthood for whatever services effectively supports abortion.

If you don’t like such small spitefulness, then you shouldn’t elect some of these people you’re electing.

For example: State Sen. Jason Rapert of Conway, the reckless showboat, is essentially threatening these childish reactions in Twitter bombs.

Planned Parenthood could turn the other cheek now on a half-dozen employees for Obamacare outreach and avoid unnecessary disturbance to the narrow and fragile legislative coalition for the private option.

Then it could go an eye for an eye if and when its greater vital role is threatened.

Here’s where we are and appear to be headed:

Key Republican architects of the private option tried to lean quietly on Insurance Commissioner Jay Bradford to excise Planned Parenthood from a list of 27 navigator contractors. Their concern mainly was that Planned Parenthood’s participation would bring abortion into the private-option debate and imperil a nationally innovative health-insurance program they passed dramatically and desperately want to see work.

Word got out and Bradford apparently is going forward with the Planned Parenthood contract to oblige the Democratic base.

Rapert, who voted for the private option, put on Twitter that he was sick and tired of taxpayer money going to what he called the nation’s leading abortion provider and said liberals are acting ill-advisedly to insist that Planned Parenthood get a contract for outreach.

That is to say that the very thing the architects feared was happening.

The Republican-dominated legislative review committee will almost assuredly refuse to give favorable advice on the Planned Parenthood contract.

Gov. Mike Beebe, though not bound, will accede to this “advisory” legislative role and not enforce the contract.

That ought to end the little dust-up mercifully. But some on the left want Planned Parenthood to sue over principle if denied the navigator contract. Presumably, Planned Parenthood could argue a First Amendment grievance if it got turned down, solely for its political thinking, for a service contract for which it was otherwise qualified.

A bill at the Legislature to deny state funds altogether to any group that performs abortions, as Rapert filed last time and threatens again, would not be as clearly unconstitutional, though probably so. And that would be a lawsuit worth having.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently refused to hear Indiana’s appeal of an appeals court’s overturning of that state’s law denying all Medicaid money to Planned Parenthood because the organization performed abortions.

So the greater risk of not letting this little matter slide is merely to the miraculous legislative approval a few months ago-by shaky two-vote margins in both chambers-of the most exponentially massive extension of affordable health care in our poor and unhealthy state’s history.

In the poetic words of Huey Long: “Now is the time for all good men to rise above principle.” -

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.