COMMENTARY

Political naivete

Bart Hester is cherub-faced, pleasant-seeming and representative of what’s wrong with Arkansas politics.

The 36-year-old former baseball catcher for the University of Arkansas Razorbacks got elected to the state Senate in 2012 by riding a Tea Party wave and with the backing of the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity.

He defeated Tim Summers, a non-extreme conservative Republican perfectly acceptable to Wal-Mart, in the primary in the Republican hotbed of Benton County.

Summers’ greatest vulnerability was that he had agreed with a measure to let the state Highway Commission ask the people to approve a tax increase for roads — a proposal the people would endorse.

But trusting the people violated the sanctity of the no-tax pledge and the anti-government obsession that define contemporary Republicanism. You see.

Hester now says the private-option form of Medicaid expansion should be repealed because all it does is give undeserved help to unworthy able-bodied people. And he says insurance rates are high for a sick, aging man solely because of Mike Ross and Barack Obama.

He said all that in writing.

A man sent me a copy of what he said was the full email conversation he’d had with Hester. I called Hester to see if the text was for real.

“Absolutely,” he said.

The man who emailed Hester wanted him to reconsider the private option, which Hester opposed, of course, in last year’s regular session.

Hester replied by email that any able-bodied person without health insurance in Washington or Benton County had only himself to blame because there are plenty of jobs.

There are only two basic things wrong with that view.

The first is that not all the jobs a man could get, even in those prosperous counties, would be full-time or inclusive of health coverage, or lucrative enough to allow the man to buy health insurance independently for himself and his family.

Not everyone can get elected to the state Senate by the Koch brothers and hop on that gravy train that is state-employee health insurance.

The second is that Arkansas has 73 counties other than Washington and Benton, and there isn’t similar consistency of prosperity and opportunity in some of those other areas.

There is, in fact, an Arkansas south of the Bobby Hopper Tunnel. You access it by driving southward through the tunnel to the other side. You see.

Then there was the matter of the emailer’s saying his father of 62 was self-employed with a low income and suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure. He said his father was quoted an absurdly high premium for health insurance last year.

That, Hester replied, was the doing of Obama and Ross with Obamacare.

Actually, the emailer shot back, his father’s premium quotes had been unaffordably high long before Obamacare took effect.

For that matter, a man with pre-existing conditions could be denied health insurance altogether before Obamacare took effect.

One reason rates have risen with Obamacare has been the increased costs of the fair and just policy of covering persons with pre-existing conditions at the same rates others pay.

As for Ross, he voted for a version of Obamacare before he was against the final version that became law.

Hester also asserted in this email exchange that the private option extended to families of four with household incomes of $94,000 a year.

Sigh. It’s difficult to engage in constructive policy discussions when facts are mutilated to such an extent by those presuming to make policy.

The $94,000 is the highest income eligible under Obamacare for a declining scale of subsidy, meaning some government help, for families of four purchasing health insurance on the exchanges.

The entirely different private option in Arkansas — meaning the full federal funding with Medicaid dollars of private-insurance purchases — applies only to those with incomes less than 138 percent of poverty.

Hester did admit to me in our phone conversation that he got that wrong. And he admitted that maybe he should sleep on emails before he sends them.

But he said he stands by what he said otherwise and that his children cannot afford for our government to be helping able-bodied people this way on their health insurance.

He relies on that phrase — able-bodied — in a treasured way that suggests he believes anyone able to work can find work, and not just any work, but the kind of good work that would pay enough to cover health insurance.

I think it’s a naive and immature view in Hester’s case. He is hamstrung by where he lives and by the forces that used him to fill a state legislative seat.

If there is anyone out there able-bodied and working, but unable to afford health insurance with what you are paid, then you might inform Sen. Hester of that.

Email him at [email protected]. He has a history of responding.

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.

Upcoming Events