It was a big week for Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who presumed to seize control both of the Governor's Mansion Commission and health-insurance rates.
I've said enough for now about the governor using the recent special session to put himself and his wife in unfettered control of the full array of buildings and grounds at the address they only temporarily and partially occupy.
It was more important, I concede, that Hutchinson made himself a de facto insurance regulator and pre-emptively rejected on Tuesday a rate-increase request made public that day from Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield and QualChoice Health Insurance.
The proposed rates for 2017 were unveiled by those carriers for persons buying subsidized and nonsubsidized individual policies on or off the Obamacare exchange, and for persons participating in the private-option form of Medicaid expansion by which Medicaid buys private policies for persons up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level.
Shortly after the proposed rate increases became public, Hutchinson announced in a news release that they were way too high.
Never mind the regulatory process at the state Insurance Commission and the integrity and political detachment thereof.
I want as much as anybody for health-insurance rates to be held low. I buy a policy that would be affected by this proposed new rate structure.
I suspect Blue Cross and Qual-Choice asked for more than they expect to get--that Blue Cross is not really counting on a 14.7 percent increase and that QualChoice would not be wiped out without a 23 percent increase.
Last year, for example, Blue Cross asked for an 8 percent increase and got about 2 percent.
But I acknowledge what is evident and should be noted: This gubernatorial administration is busily consolidating power in the governor's office and politicizing policy.
Hutchinson is entirely too strung out supporting the private option--which he calls Arkansas Works--to sit idly by and wait for actuaries to say professionally what he needs to say now politically, which is that private-option costs are not actually going to go up to the extent that Blue Cross and QualChoice are asking.
Among its myriad other benefits, the private option has held insurance rates relatively low in Arkansas. It has done that by delivering a quarter-million mostly healthy customers to the private marketplace.
But Blue Cross says costs have picked up this year, mainly for some prescription drugs and because private-option recipients finally started using their new insurance. The state also tossed about 25,000 people off the private option after a messy and flawed income-verification purge.
It turns out that the Affordable Care Act requires that proposed rate increases exceeding 10 percent for the coming year must be published within 10 business days of May 10. That came Tuesday.
State Insurance Commissioner Allen Kerr, knowing what was coming, had already hurried over to Hutchinson's office to give the governor a heads-up and see what the boss wanted to do.
So on Tuesday afternoon Kerr issued a news release assuring everybody that he--and the governor, he added--thought the proposed increases were too high.
The insurance commissioner is supposed to make the actual regulatory decision by Aug. 23, based on an actual process, mainly an actuarial study, not a political conversation with the governor.
An insurance carrier then has a right to an appeal hearing if turned down.
Max Greenwood, spokesman for Blue Cross, said the company was a tad surprised by Kerr's news release considering that actuaries for the commission had only recently begun work on the request and had asked Blue Cross for additional data that it hadn't yet supplied.
How could Kerr and the governor be so certain as to make a public declaration when the actuaries needed more information?
Well, politicians and actuaries are different.
J.R. Davis, spokesman for Hutchinson, told me the regulatory process had not been compromised at all by the news release about these proposed rate increases, which, by the way, he said, were "drastic."
"Drastic" is such a bland and neutral word.
The appropriate news release would have advised the public that the rates were merely proposed and would be subjected to a prescribed, vigorous and consumer-conscious system of review by the state Insurance Commission.
Then there is the greater issue, one the next president and Congress must address boldly and substantively if our nation survives the ongoing presidential race with anything resembling a competent government.
It is that, while Obamacare has done well extending health insurance, costs are rising unsustainably.
We're going to have to accept a little less profit providing health care and settle as consumers for a little less in the breadth and depth of what is insured.
That's unless somebody has a better solution, speaking not politically but arithmetically.
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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.
Editorial on 05/29/2016