Health costs loom, lawmakers say

State’s Medicaid spending said to be $1.8 billion by 2020

ROGERS — Lawmakers seeking to overhaul 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.

State Rep. Charlie Collins, R-Fayetteville, and Sen. Cecile Bledsoe, R-Rogers, spoke to the Conservative Arkansas nonprofit group at the Rogers Public Library.

Bledsoe is acting as Senate chairman of the task force until the 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 said.

Collins cited two votes he made in recent legislative sessions as examples of the 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 leads to others with lesser needs being able to claim the same benefits at great cost, he said.

Conduit for Action, a group that opposed the expansion of health care assistance under the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, sometimes referred to as Obamacare, said in a statement after the meeting that decisions made by state lawmakers so far give the group no confidence the lawmakers will make such hard decisions in the future.

Those types of decisions, the statement said, “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.”

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