Tuesday was a really big news day in Arkansas government.
It was all about health insurance for poor people, which some conservatives don't want to provide, no matter how much sense it makes, which, it turns out, is a lot.
The news actually broke Monday night when hardworking Roby Brock at Talk Business and Politics posted on his website what we call a scoop.
He'd gotten hold of a preliminary report from the consultant hired by the task force that Gov. Asa Hutchinson set up to change the name and unknown particulars of the private-option form of Medicaid expansion. The governor's grand scheme was to assuage his right wing by having the private option remade to look and sound like something else while staying basically the same.
The task force had rejected the consultant favored by private-option advocates. It had gone instead with one favored by critics. And that chosen consultant, the Stephen Group of New Hampshire, is the one that made the preliminary report that Brock reported.
Here is what that preliminary report said: Even as the state starts phasing in responsibility for a small percentage of private-option costs, up to 10 percent in 2021, the program will save state government, during that time, a cool $438 million.
The state treasury would reap a net gain of that amount because of:
• Taxes on the increased economic activity.
• Coverage for hospital costs otherwise uncompensated.
• The fact that the 10 percent match on the private option is a better deal than the basic Medicaid to which many recipients would return and which carries a 70-30 match of federal to state responsibility.
State Sen. Jim Hendren of Sulphur Springs, Hutchinson's nephew and co-chairman of the task force, is one of those conservatives always warning "we can't keep spending this way," except on the military. He was a fighter pilot.
He was reduced to arguing that the savings were based on $124 million in new tax income generated itself by tax expenditures, which, he told me, amounted to smoke and mirrors.
But there is no smoke. There is no mirror. There is only math.
To believe otherwise is to say that all state employee paychecks are smoke, or a mirror, or both, because they come from tax money and then they get spent in ways that generate tax money.
That's not bad. That's good.
A major road project such as the fancy new flyover for Interstates 630 and 430 in Little Rock--why, that's a matter of taking tax money and putting people to work, and of those people spending that money on taxed transactions, which is good. Meanwhile commuters can get to work and back home more conveniently.
See? It depends on whether you like poor people as much as you like bridges.
It all goes to prove--again--that the state's innovative program to take Obamacare's Medicaid-expansion money and use it to buy private insurance for persons up to 138 percent of the poverty level ... well, it was brilliant.
Other states hold it up for study and emulation.
Yet Asa wants to mess with it because he thinks he must.
His concern is politics, not policy, speaking of smoke and mirrors. The governor acknowledged as much months ago when he said that the name--private option--was "toxic."
Meantime there is that matter of the Hutchinson administration's having sent out short and vague notices and purging 50,000 Medicaid recipients, most of them on the private option, because they didn't respond to prove their income in 10 days--well, 20, by eventual practice, allowing five days for mail and five days for bureaucratic processing.
What happened Tuesday was that Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield and Ambetter, the two largest private-option carriers, bailed out the Hutchinson administration.
They said they would keep paying pharmacy bills for purged persons and that they would hold pending other general medical claims for 30 days past cancellation.
Any of those purged persons subsequently deemed eligible by ongoing reviews--and that should be a lot of them--would get their coverage back and all their proper claims paid.
It's in the carriers' interest to do that. They need customers. And they'd don't need to be a party to a political and bureaucratic blunder that denies vital medications to some poor sick person.
But it also amounts to a private-sector bailout of a reckless government, which is to say the inverse of the national condition in 2008.
Nonetheless, Hutchinson announced that his administration would now return full speed to the purge with short notice, though with new letters that would be clearer about the fact that poor people's health insurance was on the chopping block unless they gathered up some bank records right quick.
In other words, Hutchinson said he started the fire but had it contained and will now return to playing with matches, though fewer and smaller ones.
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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 08/20/2015