Asa Hutchinson's campaign took exception to an assertion in the column of arrows Sunday.
The interesting thing is not what the exception was. It's what the exception wasn't.
I'd said that Hutchinson opposes raising the state's minimum wage. A campaign aide said Hutchinson opposes only the proposed initiated act favored by Mike Ross to take the minimum wage to $8.50 an hour in three years.
But, the aide said, Hutchinson supports legislative action to raise the state's minimum rate of $6.25 an hour to the current national one of $7.25 an hour.
Let it be stipulated, then, that Hutchinson opposes letting the people vote on a new minimum wage. (Though it's all right if they vote on your sex life.)
Let it be stipulated that Hutchinson wants the Legislature to set your minimum wage instead.
Let it be stipulated that he opposes taking the rate over time to $8.50 an hour.
Let it be stipulated that he'd take the state rate only to a level that would be $1.25 an hour less than provided in the initiated act, and only equal to what the national rate is already.
That ought to make the state's poor working folks feel better.
So here is what the objection wasn't: I'd said the next governor, whether Hutchinson or Ross, would fight to keep the private-option form of Medicaid expansion.
Not a peep emanated on that from the Hutchinson camp.
For the record, Hutchinson says the private option is a pilot project beset with early cost problems. He says it poses long-term affordability issues and needs to be fixed if we are to continue it.
He says the real objective ought to be putting recipients to work in new and better jobs.
What he never says is what the Tea Party and the Koch brothers say, which is a simple adios to the private option.
He, and we, can't undo the private option because:
It would jerk health insurance from 200,000 people.
It would reinstate unsustainable uncompensated costs for small rural hospitals.
It would blow up the state government budget. While eventually the state must take a bigger share of Medicaid expansion, the immediate biennial effect of the private option is to save the state money it otherwise would have to pay in higher matching rates for traditional Medicaid.
It would explode everyone's health-insurance rates in Arkansas by taking 200,000 relatively healthy people from the private option out of the health-care exchange.
Those exchange rates will go up next year, but not by nearly as much as would be the case without the private-option participation.
And doing away with the private option would remove a nationally innovative program that imposes conservative principles of consumerism and personal responsibility on a liberal program, perhaps showing a better way.
It's working well so far. It will work better as we go along.
Hutchinson knows all that. But he can't say he needs Obamacare. He can only wait until he's governor and then explain that he needs the private option for budgeting and for tax cuts because, drat, Obamacare is not going away.
And he'll need to put some conservative packaging on it, probably by tying it somehow more closely to state Sen. Jane English's ideas for improved work-force education requirements and services.
And, irony of ironies, Hutchinson offers a better chance than Ross to get the private option reauthorized. That's certainly the case in the state Senate where Republicans are assured of a significant majority.
Balking Republican senators would more readily go along on this defining issue with their party's governor than with a Democratic governor.
Meanwhile, the private option's insertion of Arkansas into the national health-policy vanguard is soon to take on broader relevance.
State Sen. David Sanders of Little Rock, one of the Republican architects of the private option, notes that the Affordable Care Act has a provision allowing states to seek general waivers--not just Medicaid waivers--beginning in 2017.
That means states could configure the proposed regulation of their in-state health-insurance marketplaces differently from Obamacare, then seek federal approval to proceed for five years so long as they didn't fall below coverage targets or increase costs.
Vermont is interested in a waiver to set up a single-payer system. Sanders says he'll ask the General Assembly next year to pass legislation authorizing Arkansas to work on such a waiver for a more conservative, consumer-oriented system better customized for Arkansas.
He declines to get specific, saying he'll be targeted from the left and right soon enough.
He and Sen. Jonathan Dismang of Beebe seem to believe they can use the private option as a foundation for all of the health-insurance market to show how we can insure more people for less money while giving people more consumer flexibility.
None of that can happen if the next governor or the next legislature destroys the foundation.
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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.
Editorial on 07/17/2014