COMMENTARY Lawmaker Seeks To Hide Option

The other night, as my wife and I enjoyed the Jackson L. Graves Foundation’s outstanding Ooh La La fundraiser to benefit Arkansas Children’s Hospital, my phone vibrated.

A message on the screen showed a text message from my oldest son, who was nearing his bedtime back home, but clearly he had other matters on his mind. The photo 11-year-old Eli sent along with the message was a business card he had designed. “Your dog deserves love,” said the card, which identified him as “Eli Harton, Dog Walker.”

It’s a business he created last year as a way to make a little extra money. He did OK with it, but obviously his thinking this night was about expansion. “Can I buy 250 of these for 10 dollars?” he wrote.

My little entrepreneur. He knows a big part of achieving success with any venture is to get the word out.

Have you heard of a little thing called Obamacare? It’s providing a way for millions of people to get something I’d hate for me and my family to be without - health insurance. In Arkansas, Obamacare and the president whose push for reforms of the nation’s health care system are about as popular as the Texas Longhorns (substitute Missouri Tigers for those who don’t remember the Southwest Conference. It’ll do.).

But Arkansas’ lawmakers last year created an innovative work-around to full-scale participation in Obamacare.

It’s become known as the “private option,” through which low-income Arkansans can get federal Medicaid subsidies that allow them to purchase private health insurance. The decision allowed the state to tap into $915 million in annual federal dollars to subsidize that coverage.

The private option, as most know now, barely got enough votes last year, and 2014 politics make it highly questionable whether a new appropriation of the Medicaid budget will pass.

Opponents who lost last year’s battle see an opportunity to kill the private option by starving it of funding.

House Speaker Davy Carter says he expects the House to approve the funding on Tuesday or thereabouts. Opponents in the 35-member Senate believe they’ve assured defeat of the private option there.

But let’s look at the version Carter believes will be approved. The Joint Budget Committee voted 40-11 last week to endorse the Department of Human Services budget containing the private option, but with several amendments. Among those amendments is one by Rep. Nate Bell of Mena that assumes the private option continues, for now, but would make it illegal for the state to allocate, budget or expend any money “for the purpose of advertisement, promotion or other activities designed to promote or encourage enrollment” in the private option.

Bell apparently believes it’s a good idea, if the state is going to maintain the private option, to avoid telling the people it might help about it.

Folks, you may know Old McDonald was a really bad speller, but even he knows how to spell “s-t-u-p-i-d” - e-i-e-i-o.

Oppose the private option if you want to, but if it’s going to exist as a program of the state of Arkansas, the state ought to do its dead-level best to inform the citizens eligible for the program’s benefits and how to access them. Don’t light a lamp then hide it under a bushel.

Defeat the private option if you can - and the program’s opponents very well may in this session - but to have the program only to hide it would be dumber than my son starting a business and not telling anyone about it.

Bell and others may believe they can’t kill the private option this year, but they want to ensure the state doesn’t do anything to promote it until they can kill it later. I find it to be a cynical manipulation to have a program - whether it’s good fiscal policy or not - that can literally heal people while it exists, but state policy would be to hide it from those it’s designed to help.

If you can’t kill it, let it do what it was designed to do.

The Legislature did the best it could last year to develop an alternative to Obamacare that nonetheless allowed the state to access hundreds of millions of dollars for Arkansas’ poor.

To create a helping hand only to keep it firmly hidden in one’s pocket is beyond shameful.

Here’s my idea: Let’s continue to cut paychecks for the state’s lawmakers, but hide them in different places within their home districts without telling them where they are.

GREG HARTON IS OPINION PAGE EDITOR FOR NWA MEDIA.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 02/17/2014

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