Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced Tuesday that he will suspend meanness for a couple of weeks and then resume it.
He said it's hard for employees of the state Human Services Department to keep up with the pace of people being summarily thrown off the private-option form of Medicaid expansion because they didn't answer their mail quickly.
So he's going to bring in extra help--for the bureaucrats. The poor people are on their own.
Maybe these poor folks got in the mail a letter from some official-sounding agency forwarded to their current mobile-home address from their former one.
Maybe the letter told them something they didn't understand, something about losing their Medicaid eligibility for private health insurance they didn't know they had. They'd probably been auto-enrolled.
Maybe the letter accused them of having earned a little more money lately, thus making them ineligible for this thing they didn't know they had. Maybe they said "beats me," and round-filed the letter, and went out to see if the car would start.
The fact is that they just lost health insurance because they didn't respond in 10 days to serve notice that they intended to argue their income as asserted in this letter they received six or seven days into the 10-day "grace" period, using the word "grace" most abusively.
And they lost it because the Human Services Department reached a conclusion about the level of meagerness of their income by using some interfacing software that has been an unreliable mess from the start.
The state has sent out 60,000 or so letters telling people it looks like they've improved their financial lot in life sufficiently to be purged from the rolls of the private option.
To date, 35,000 or so of those people have been thrown off, nearly all of those--97 percent--because they didn't respond in 10 days.
Human Services officials say they are surprised so few people responded. I'm not.
So now if those people get sick and go to the doctor or the emergency room, they will not have the insurance they would have had--whether they knew they had it or not. The people in the doctors' offices who do the billing so the doctors won't starve--they're the ones who know how to find out who is insured for payment and who isn't.
We are headed toward purging 50,000 people, knowledgeable sources estimate.
But here is what has happened just lately: There has been so much state agency paperwork associated with these purges--and with checking out the increased level of objections that letter recipients are starting to raise because the health-insurance companies and agents have alerted them to do so--that the governor has stepped in.
Hutchinson has now said that, for two weeks, nobody will get a letter or be purged while he brings in extra people and approves overtime work at Human Services. After that, he says, we'll go back to the 10-day purge, because that's not the problem. The problem, he says, is the overwhelming pace of bureaucratic processing.
He defended the 10-day deadline because that's the minimum notice required by the federal government for throwing someone off Medicaid. The minimum.
Long before this administration, Arkansas was a state anxious to punish its too-many poor people as soon as the federal government would permit it.
Please understand that it is appropriate, indeed essential, that state government make periodic checks of Medicaid recipients and take away their benefits if they've risen above the income threshold. But there is no reason to haul off and do it this abruptly, this quickly, with an untested system.
Actually, there is a reason, one not human, but political.
It's that Hutchinson, who is not nearly this cold by personal nature, is beholden to his right-wing flank to get tough with supposed Medicaid cheaters if he is to have any hope of passing a modified extension of Medicaid expansion after 2017.
A more deliberate process would be better, and, in the end, more fair and valid.
Best bets are that the state will end up having to put a lot of these people back on the private option.
Poor people's incomes vary by how many hours they worked this week, based on the weather, or the season, or the available work, or whether the kid was sick, or whether the car would start.
Poor people typically don't get a contracted salary and regular direct deposit.
Their Medicaid eligibility should be monitored responsibly and vigorously, even toughly, but not hurriedly, and never recklessly.
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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 08/06/2015