Between the lines: When 'no' means 'yes'

Legislative gymnastics employed to keep Arkansas Works

Does the end justify the means?

The question ought to be on the minds of every Arkansas lawmaker right now.

That applies to both the large majority of lawmakers who support funding Arkansas Works, a renamed and reworked Medicaid expansion program, and the small minority who oppose it.

Lawmakers seem to be headed toward killing the program but doing it in a way that would allow Gov. Asa Hutchinson to resurrect it with a line-item veto.

How's that for confusing?

Theoretically, with this approach, the result would be that the more than 250,000 low-income Arkansans who get health insurance under the expansion program would still be insured.

That's good. They should be.

But the means to that end isn't so good. It is all about subterfuge.

The players all know what's going on, but their constituents may not quite follow.

Here's what happened:

The Arkansas Legislature returned Tuesday for the second week of a biennial fiscal session, after deadlocking on the Medicaid funding appropriation last week that included money for Arkansas Works.

The expansion program, previously known as the "private option," uses federal funds to buy private insurance for more than 250,000 qualifying low-income Arkansans. Other Medicaid recipients fall under a different program, but funding for all of them is in the appropriation bill that failed last week.

Gov. Hutchinson had earlier won legislative backing for Arkansas Works in a special session of the Legislature. Ninety-five of the 135 members of the Legislature voted for the legislation.

Last week, when those same lawmakers assembled for the fiscal session, they took up this critical funding issue.

The Senate voted on the bill Thursday, but it fell two votes short of passage. Senators favored the funding 25 to 10. Passage required a three-quarters vote, or 27 votes.

The long and short of the matter is that two of those 10 "no" votes must change for the funding to pass in the straightforward manner originally presented.

House leaders believe they'll have the 75 House votes necessary for passage, so the attention is primarily on these 10 senators and what it might take to sway them to vote for the Medicaid funding.

That's where the subterfuge comes in.

Gov. Hutchinson is now pushing a plan to have the Legislature pass a bill that would end funding for the expansion program, but he promises to veto that particular line item.

The effect of the veto would be to restore funding for Arkansas Works. He would then ask the Legislature to uphold his veto, which requires only a majority vote, not the three-quarters super majority needed to pass it without the veto trickery.

It is apparently a means to the desired end, although at least a couple of lawmakers are already threatening a lawsuit to test the approach.

Meanwhile, there is evidence the plan could succeed.

The governor has reportedly found at least two of the 10 Republicans who voted "no" last week who will vote for the new bill, knowing full well that he will veto the line item ending the expansion.

He still has to persuade others who support funding the expansion to vote for it and to trust him to undo their "no" votes with that promised veto.

What we have then is a handful of Republicans being pacified with a way to keep voting against this program they've long opposed. They can hold that record up to constituents even though they knew the governor was going to negate their vote with his veto.

But we also have a lot of Democrats and Republicans who would vote for this latest incarnation of Medicaid expansion being asked to vote kill Arkansas Works. Their "no" votes will be on the record, too; and they'll have some explaining to do to their own constituents.

Lawmakers were fine-tuning the alternative approach on Tuesday and simultaneously hoping a couple of those recalcitrant senators would agree to vote for the Medicaid appropriation without the subterfuge.

That would be the preferred answer and would allow the Legislature to move on to consider the rest of the state budget, which faces severe cuts if the state ultimately turns down the federal Medicaid dollars that would fund Arkansas Works.


These are the 10 senators who voted against the Medicaid funding last week:

Sens. Cecile Bledsoe of Rogers, Linda Collins-Smith of Batesville, Scott Flippo of Mountain Home, Alan Clark of Lonsdale, Bart Hester of Cave Springs, Missy Irvin of Mountain View, Blake Johnson of Corning, Bryan King of Green Forest, Terry Rice of Waldron and Gary Stubblefield of Branch.

They -- or any of the other senators -- can be reached through the Senate switchboard at 501-682-2902. Leave a message to register your support or opposition for Arkansas Works.

Commentary on 04/20/2016

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