Kochs grant Arkansas poor people a year

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Presses must be stopped. The Koch brothers have given Arkansas conservatives special permission just this once to let poor people get some help for another year.

The Kochs’ local conservative advocacy organization, the Arkansas chapter of Americans for Prosperity, does not put it that way. But I do.

I even could put it this way: The Koch brothers have endorsed Obamacare for a year.

But that would amount to an exploited over-simplification, and people shouldn’t engage in that kind of unseemliness, though the Kochs’ agents often do.

Here’s what I’m getting at: Americans for Prosperity put out a statement Monday saying it would “not score” legislators’ vote in this ongoing fiscal session on re-upping the appropriation to continue the state’s private-option form of Medicaid expansion for 12 months after July 1.

“Not score” effectively means the Koch group would not consider legislators’ votes on the matter in its advancement of economic libertarian causes and candidates in coming Republican primaries.

In other words, AFP-beholden legislators, of which there are too many, will suffer nothing in the way of lost AFP backing by voting for the appropriation this one time. Nor will they gain anything in the way of acquiring AFP backing by voting against it this one time.

Why the retreat?

It’s pragmatism. Glorious pragmatism.

It’s apparently the case that the Koch group adjudges the issue in this fiscal session much as right-wing Rep. Nate Bell of Mena adjudges it.

It is that blocking the re-upping of the appropriation by a very few votes, but enough to deny the steep three-fourths majority, would invite Gov. Mike Beebe and others to end the fiscal session without a Medicaid budget or any finished general revenue budget.

The opposition would easily be labeled Washington-styled obstructionism. And the effort likely would come to utter futility. Almost assuredly, the governor would call a special session to get the budget passed with the private option in it before July 1.

Bell, yielding to that thinking, got the appropriation amended to bar the state from promoting new enrollment in the program for a year.

Americans for Prosperity said it liked Bell’s work.

So, on that practical note, Republican state legislators have been given leave by the mighty Kochs to hold their noses and vote for this program for one more year.

After that the full intent on the Kochian front will be to kill the private because it’s … you know, big government, too helpful to poor people and not respectful enough of the market economy.

Some conservative legislators will still vote “no.” Some will do so out of fear of tea party organizations in their districts. Others will apply their honest opinion that the federal government cannot afford to provide this insurance and the state can’t afford to assume part of the cost later.

Apparently the Koch permission has had no effect in the state Senate where, it now appears, state Sen. Jane English of North Little Rock, on an entirely different basis, will reverse herself and cast the vital 27th vote for the private option.

She will do so after tying her support to reforms in the state’s workforce education and workforce training programs. She and her chief ally, Sen. David Sanders of Little Rock, have just put Gov. Mike Beebe’s cabinet members through three days of hoops as the administration attempted to oblige her.

It helped that the governor and his people — economic development director Grant Tennille and higher education director Shane Broadway, primarily — agreed with her. The tie-in to the private option is that English was averse to Medicaid expansion, considering it a disincentive to recipients’ job-seeking, unless we had a better system of workforce education and training.

So, at present, by the leave of the Kochs and the bipartisan efforts of English, Sanders and the Beebe administration, it is beginning to appear that the private option will live to fight for its life again next winter.