HARRISON -- Voters in Senate District 17 are divided over whether to elect state Rep. John Burris, R-Harrison, one of three legislative architects of the state's fledgling private option, or private-option opposer Scott Flippo of Mountain Home.
The Burris-Flippo contest is the latest legislative race where the future of the private option is a dominant issue. With a supermajority needed to continue private-option funding, the loss of even a few supporters in the Legislature could change its future.
John Porter of Harrison, a retired McKesson Corp. sales executive, said he supports Flippo partly because Flippo, an owner of an assisted-living facility in Bull Shoals, "will do whatever he needs to do to defund the private option," which uses federal Medicaid dollars to purchase private health insurance for low-income Arkansans.
"I believe the private option is Obamacare disguised as a different name," he said in an interview Tuesday, the first day of early voting in the Republican race runoff.
Porter said he supported Burris' three successful campaigns for the state House of Representatives, where Burris has served since 2009, but he couldn't support Burris' state Senate bid.
The winner of Tuesday's runoff will be unopposed in the Nov. 4 general election and will succeed departing state Sen. Johnny Key, R-Mountain Home, who has accepted a job with the University of Arkansas System starting in January.
On May 20, Burris received 42.6 percent of the primary vote, narrowly ahead of Flippo's 41.9 percent.
Mountain Home Mayor David Osmon finished third with 15.5 percent.
Vickie Burlsworth of Harrison, executive director of the Brandon Burlsworth Foundation, said she voted for Burris in part because he's "a great guy" who has six years of experience in the Legislature and the best interests of his constituents in mind.
This Senate race is "so heated," she lamented.
"It seems like the other guy is pretty jaded and nasty," Burlsworth said. She pointed to the campaign ads and mailers from Flippo and his allies, including Flippo's mailer that says Burris "chose to work for [President Barack] Obama rather than Arkansas," in creating the private option.
"Burris has always voted with the people, and he's trying to correct the things that Americans are so disgusted with," Burlsworth said.
Sue Lucas of Harrison, who works for the North Arkansas Partnership for Health Education program at North Arkansas College, said she voted for Burris because she knows his family, including his father who is a pastor at Unity Missionary Baptist Church south of Harrison, and their "good family values."
But Raymond Jackson of Harrison, a retired farmer, said he voted for Flippo largely because Flippo opposes education standards that many states have embraced. Burris said he also opposes those standards.
The Arkansas Board of Education in July 2010 adopted the Common Core State Standards in mathematics and English/language arts, putting Arkansas among the 46 states and District of Columbia to all adopt the same set of standards.
The new standards replaced Arkansas' old standards over three years' time, starting in kindergarten-through-second grades in the 2011-12 school year and finishing this year in grades nine-through-12. Three states, including Oklahoma, have repealed the standards.
The Republican runoff race in Senate District 17 has been spiced by two state Ethics Commission complaints filed against Burris and with both candidates complaining about each other, and their supporters misrepresenting the candidates' records and stances.
There's even been a complaint filed by state Rep. Nate Bell, R-Mena, with the state Republican Party alleging that the party's 1st Congressional District chairman Benny Speaks of Mountain Home violated party rules in part by singing a song lampooning Burris at a rally for Flippo in Mountain Home.
Apparently swiping a tune from Jimmy Buffett, Speaks said that Burris "is wasting away again in John Burrisville" and blaming Flippo when Burris "knows it's his own damn fault."
Speaks initially said Thursday that he didn't believe that he violated state party rules with the comments he made through the song, and then he said he wasn't aware of the party rule, adopted in February, that bars a district chairman from showing favoritism during a primary. He declined to say whether he's supporting Flippo, though Bell's complaint alleges that he has endorsed Flippo.
Senate District 17 consists of parts of Boone County, including Harrison; Baxter County, including Mountain Home; and Marion County, which includes Yellville.
Both candidates are doing all they can to round up voters ahead of Tuesday's runoff election.
Last Tuesday, Burris set up a tent across the street from the early voting site at a North Arkansas College campus in Harrison and offered hamburgers and hot dogs to people wearing "I voted" stickers.
"I am just offering them free lunch for voting," said Burris, who is on leave from his job as political director for U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton's U.S. Senate campaign.
"It is the first week of summer, and people are just checking out and going on vacation. It is just a tough time to have an election, and I think the more people that vote the better," said Burris.
In contrast, Flippo held a campaign rally Tuesday that drew about 50 people in Mountain Home, including a man who ran unsuccessfully for governor.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Curtis Coleman of Little Rock -- who called the private option "a public trap" at the rally -- endorsed Flippo's state Senate bid.
Baxter County is the only county that Coleman won in the May 20 primary against Republican gubernatorial nominee Asa Hutchinson of Rogers.
"This is a rally for our freedoms, for our liberties, for our children, for what is coming tomorrow," Flippo told the group. "I believe that where you stand on Medicaid expansion decides whether you are going to be a player in the role in which we expand government or that you are going to be a player in the role in which we reduce it."
Coleman wasn't the only one making endorsements. David Osmon, the third-place finisher, has now endorsed Burris.
Osmon said Burris "understands the importance of hospitals to our communities [and] has the character to make difficult choices for our state and will make decisions based on fact and not on fiction," according to a statement issued through Burris.
Vince Leist, chief executive officer for the North Arkansas Regional Medical Center in Harrison that employs about 800 people, said he projects the Medicare reimbursement cuts designed to help fund the state Medicaid expansions allowed under the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to cost the hospital $19 million during the next six years, but the private option will allow the hospital to recoup $9 million of that during this period.
The hospital's share of patients without health insurance has dropped from 9 percent to 4.5 percent since the private-option health insurance coverage has been available to low-income Arkansans, he said.
"This Senate race is troubling because the private option is the center of it," said Leist. "It's extremely important for rural hospitals."
The North Arkansas Regional Medical Center is Boone County's second-largest employer behind Federal Express, which employs about 1,500 workers there, according to Patty Methvin, president of the Harrison Regional Chamber of Commerce.
Baxter Regional Medical Center in Mountain Home is Baxter County's largest employer with 1,374 employees, according to the hospital's president and chief executive officer Ron Peterson.
"If the private option was no longer available to Arkansans, we believe we would need to reduce our operating cost even more than we have, this would more than likely include an adjustment in staffing and services in order to continue operations of the organization," he said.
Along with state Sens. David Sanders, R-Little Rock and Jonathan Dismang, R-Searcy, Burris is an architect of the state's private-option program.
The expansion of the Medicaid program, approved by the Legislature last year, extends coverage to adults with incomes of up to 138 percent of the poverty level -- $16,105 for an individual or $32,913 for a family of four.
More than 140,000 people have obtained health-insurance coverage through the program since enrollment began Oct. 1, according to the state Department of Human Services.
The department's latest figures show that 2,476 people have applied and are eligible for the program in Boone County as of April 30, compared with 2,273 in Baxter County and 1,056 in Marion County.
Opponents of the private option often call it Obamacare because funding was made possible by the Affordable Care Act of 2010. Supporters maintain that it's not Obamacare because it was created by Arkansans and the state obtained waivers from the federal government for the program.
The federal government will pay the full cost of covering the newly eligible enrollees until 2017, when states will begin paying 5 percent of the cost. The states' share will then rise each year until it reaches 10 percent in 2020.
Burris said Flippo "wants to raise the sales tax to pay for corporate income tax [cuts], and he wants to let the federal government wreak havoc on our health-care system."
He said Flippo "has been very open that his plan for dealing with Obamacare is to sit and wait, but our hospitals don't have that luxury, citizens who see their premiums increasing don't have that luxury. Seniors who have their Medicare reimbursements cut don't have that luxury.
"Sitting and waiting isn't an option," he said.
Flippo said he's not interested in raising taxes.
He said he's interested in "shifting to a flat sales tax and looking to eliminate the income tax, be it corporate and personal income tax in the state of Arkansas to make us more competitive with businesses and make Arkansas a more business friendly state."
Flippo said he disagrees with Burris' "doomsday scenarios ... if we do nothing," with the Affordable Care Act funds.
"I think the worst thing we can do is to expand Medicaid to able-bodied, working-age adults when it is already not working for those in true need, i.e. your elderly, handicapped, people with disabilities and children," he said.
"But something has got to be done [about the private option], and we got to do it in a responsible way and in a responsible scaled-back approach, which is looking at the next year and doing a scaled rollback," Flippo said.
A three-fourths vote is required in the 100-member state House and 35-member Senate to authorize funding for the private-option program. Funding for the program has been narrowly approved by the Legislature in the 2013 and 2014 sessions.
If Burris loses the state Senate runoff, "the loss of another Senate supporter would create new challenges for the program," said Jay Barth, a politics professor at Hendrix College in Conway, who lost his Democratic bid for the state Senate in 2010.
"There would be additional symbolic impact from the loss of a race by one of the program's architects," he said, but "the fact that so many Arkansans now have coverage under the program does change the context for any private-option debate moving forward in a manner that is favorable to the program's survival."
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