Commentary: Arkansas Legislature is not blessing for needy

Lawmakers give to rich, take from poor

OK, I've got a dog in this hunt. My wife directs our local network of federally qualified health centers for Benton and Washington counties--Community Clinic. Clinics like hers have enjoyed bipartisan support across the nation since their founding 50 years ago.

Community health centers exist to give quality medical care in underserved areas and to underserved populations. Many clinics are in rural areas where there are few or no doctors. They serve low-income families who can't afford insurance. In Arkansas, 12 percent of our neighbors are uninsured despite the state's "private option" funding of insurance coverage.

In Northwest Arkansas many doctors limit how many Medicaid patients they will see, so Community Clinic serves neighbors with Medicaid who do not have access to a private provider. Recently a local private clinic asked Community Clinic to pick up 3,000 more ARKids children. The private clinic doesn't have space or staff to serve them. Community Health Centers are mandated to serve everyone and cannot turn away any patient.

Community health centers were early adopters of several "best practices" that are just now being embraced more universally. Community Clinic went to electronic medical records in 2008. In 2009 they introduced integrative behavioral health into their primary care, so if a patient with the flu also shows signs of depression or some other behavioral illness, a therapist is available to address the problem right then and there. Community health centers mandate outcomes-based primary care. As more health providers measure outcomes, rising costs are slowing and patients are improving.

Community Clinic also has a strong educational focus, working with chronic illnesses to improve the health of people living with diabetes, hypertension, obesity and to help smokers quit tobacco. Community Health Centers in Arkansas serve 177,000 underserved patients, more than 31,000 of them in the 12 locations my wife oversees locally.

One more thing. community health centers are job creators. When my wife started at Community Clinic, they employed just more than 20 people. Now it is a staff of more than 200. The size of their program has doubled since 2009. Community Clinic is creating good jobs and pumping money into our economy.

End of infomercial.

So here's what happened at the end to the recent legislative session. The governor started the budget process with a middle-class tax cut, returning about $40 per family. (The bottom 20 percent of Arkansas taxpayers saw no relief, even though they pay twice the percentage of their income in state taxes as the wealthiest taxpayers.) The tax cuts hurt efforts to restore pre-kindergarten funding to its 2008 level. The cuts diverted state funds from several significant programs important to working families and at-risk Arkansans. It was a hard legislative session for those of us who care for the poor.

Then, toward the end of the session, a bill was introduced to increase tax breaks for the wealthy, raising the exemption on capital gains income. The most shocking part of the bill proposed making capital gains of more than $10 million entirely free of taxation. The bill passed. It was windfall for the rich--$6 million this fiscal year; almost $12 million next year.

This new gift to those who least needed it left the budget in a deficit. As time ran out on the legislative session, somebody had to find another $6 million.

As the session was closing, the Revenue Stabilization Act found a way to balance the budget. The entire state funding for community health centers ($4.9 million) was erased, and they took another $1 million from libraries.

In the Arkansas Blog, Max Brantley cited a bank executive who had acquired considerable stock at a nominal cost and was selling about $25 million of it this year. Under the new law, he will owe no taxes on about $15 million of those gains. That's a half-million dollar tax break for one individual. The cut cost our local Community Clinic and its 31,000 patients $600,000.

For those of us who look at things through the lens of Scripture and through the story of Jesus, we see that the Bible takes seriously the relationship between the wealthy and the poor--the wealthy have responsibility for the well-being of the poor and marginalized. But not in Arkansas, it seems. It seems our Legislature prefers to make its highest value lowering taxes for the wealthy. It's just too bad that the unintended consequence is that fewer and fewer scraps fall from the masters' table.

God bless the poor. Our Legislature sure doesn't.

Commentary on 05/19/2015

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