Tough calls await lawmakers, health care leaders tell group

ROGERS -- Lawmakers seeking to reform state health care programs will face tough and unpopular decisions that have nothing to do with the politically charged "private option" debate, co-chairmen of the Health Reform Legislative Task Force said Saturday in Rogers.

House chairman Rep. Charlie Collins, R-Fayetteville, and chairwoman Sen. Cecile Bledsoe, R-Rogers, spoke to the Conservative Arkansas nonprofit group at the Rogers Public Library. Bledsoe remains Senate chairman of the task force until regular chairman Sen. Jim Hendren, R-Sulphur Springs, returns from active duty deployment with the Air Force reserves in December.

Total spending on the Medicaid program in Arkansas is expected to reach $1.8 billion by 2020, state figures show. Controlling those costs is the state's biggest health care challenge but "that's flying under the radar because we're not having a food fight about it," Collins told the group.

Collins cited two votes he made in recent legislative sessions as examples of the kinds of tough calls lawmakers will have to make in the future. He voted against a bill that would require insurance companies to cover treatment for autism, and another that would have extended insurance benefits to firefighters for certain types of cancers.

"It's a cold, hard, unpleasant, difficult truth that we didn't get in the situation we're in because of corruption and waste, but by taking care of the people we care about," Collins said. But being compassionate to people in dire need led to others with lesser needs being able to claim the same benefits at great cost, he said.

Another example was granting an income tax exemption to veterans. Collins is a Navy veteran. How can you be against autistic kids, firefighters and veterans, he asked rhetorically. But if you grant a tax exemption to veteran and benefits to certain groups, people without those exemptions can validly ask why their groups were excluded.

Conduit for Action, a group that opposed the expansion of health care assistance under federal health reform, said in a statement after the meeting decisions made by state lawmakers so far gives the group no confidence it will make hard decisions in the future. Those types of hard decisions "will continue, in even higher frequency, as the most vulnerable among us are asked to wait for medical services so that Arkansas can continue to expand welfare Medicaid coverage to nonworking but able-to-work adults under Arkansas Obamacare Private Option or Arkansas Works or whatever name they chose to use in the future."

NW News on 11/08/2015

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