COMMENTARY

BRUMMETT ONLINE: Democrats play hooky

It’s tough being an adult Democrat in a childish Republican state. So Democratic state legislators have decided to take a few days off from being the grownups in the Capitol.

Three of them — Sens. Keith Ingram of West Memphis and Linda Chesterfield of Little Rock, along with Rep. Deborah Ferguson of West Memphis — conspicuously abstained Monday.

They did so on the health-care task force’s vote to recommend that Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s mildly conservatized form of Medicaid expansion get enacted in the special session the governor has called the first of April.

That’s the private option, which the governor wants to start calling Arkansas Works.

The abstentions were inevitably inconsequential. The recommendation passed without those three Democrats. The votes that count will take place in the special session and in the fiscal session shortly after that.

But the Democrats’ action was worth noting. As best I can determine, it represented the first time a vote of any kind on Medicaid expansion had taken place in the state Legislature and garnered anything other than support from Democratic legislators.

After several conversations, I believe I can synopsize this new Democratic legislative position as follows:

Democrats believe they have done the right thing every time, voting repeatedly to expand Medicaid, while Republicans have fought among themselves and forced innumerable roll-call votes that took the state to the brink of budgetary calamity.

Being the consistent adult is bad politics. No matter what they do, Democrats are going to get hammered in fall campaigns by cynical Republicans berating them for the Obamacare upon which their own governor relies.

Now Democrats see that the governor is seeking federal waivers to put conservative flourishes on the private option, and they’re not crazy about that. So they wouldn’t mind having some input into which of those flourishes to round-file and which merely to revise.

They also would like to have some say in this idea the governor promotes to turn much of Medicaid over to outside management companies that would set the rules for nearly everything except nursing homes, which the governor allowed to carve out an exception, owing to their lobbying power.

Democrats are worried that outside managers would shortchange providers and poor folks.

So Democrats have decided simply to sit on their hands for a while. If the governor wants to know what they’d like on those waivers or managed care, he knows their phone number.

If he can pass Arkansas Works without them — which he can’t, of course, because he can’t count on his own party with its irresponsible base — then he should feel free to do so.

That’s the spiel. So let’s hope Democrats enjoy this brief period of sitting on their hands. They are entitled. Adults need a vacation sometimes.

But theirs is a meaningless exercise. Vacations must be returned from.

In the end, Hutchinson can only impose whatever conservative flourishes the Obama administration approves in waivers.

Arkansas Democratic legislators aren’t going to throw a quarter-million poor people off health insurance — period. But they surely aren’t going to do it on the basis that Barack Obama let Hutchinson do something too conservative — such as charging a small premium on the least-poor, or encouraging work training, or forcing recipients employed by companies offering group insurance to take the company insurance instead of Medicaid.

The managed-care issue is a separate policy decision. You can’t cut off the private option to spite managed care.

Democrats won’t shut down an agency’s appropriation because of a single policy. Otherwise they’d give Jason Rapert license to vote against the private option unless gay marriage was undone, or abortion ended, or “Just as I Am” made the state song.

Ingram, the abstaining senator from West Memphis, gave a speech in which he criticized Hutchinson’s dominance of the task force. I found that disingenuous. Governors don’t appoint task forces for independent thought. They appoint them to set the table for the governor’s purposes.

When Hutchinson made his nephew Jim Hendren the co-chairman of the health-care task force, any lame pretense that the task force existed for any purpose other than Asa’s was abandoned.

The thing about a threat is that you must be committed to follow through. The Democrats will never kill Medicaid expansion. Thus they are making no threat.

They’re making a point, if not the clearest in the world.

By the way: The word is that Ingram might have in mind running against Hutchinson next time. He told me such a thing was his least priority, which is not to deny that he’s thinking about it.

Somebody is going to have to do it. Taking health insurance from a quarter-million people might not be the strongest foundation for such a race.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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