U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton is among 11 Republican senators meeting privately to fashion an Obamacare-replacement health insurance law.
What they're trying to design presumably would be more serious than the instantly dismissed nonsense the House of Representatives sent over so that the simpleton demagogue that is our pitiable excuse for a president could brag about a pointless legislative victory.
Yet we can't get a simple answer from Cotton on whether he will use that pivotal role to try to save only the most important and successful health insurance program in the state he ostensibly represents. I mean Arkansas, not Iowa. And I mean Medicaid expansion.
It is a program the Republican governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, has nobly embraced, reformed and preserved.
In a chatty televised conversation that aired Sunday on Talk Business, Cotton did say something interesting on the issue. What he said would indicate, absent a direct follow-up question, that he's working in those private meetings to throw a quarter-million working poor Arkansans off health insurance and let rural hospitals close and the state budget blow all to hell.
By the way, I've asked this direct question, but Cotton's staff won't respond to me, perhaps because I've hurt their feelings with something I've written. Or maybe they're better off politically doing chatty television interviews than fielding direct questions from antique newspaper people.
Either way, this is what Cotton said to Talk Business after regurgitating the conservative banality that we need to reform Medicaid to make it cheaper and tougher: "Ultimately our goal should be to get the most able-bodied adults off Medicaid and into a job, or into the individual market, so Medicaid can continue to provide the role that it did before Obamacare, which is supporting the elderly and disabled and the severely poor."
Let's break down that Cotton gem of ominous rhetoric:
First, everyone agrees that able-bodied adults should be blessed with the opportunity and possessed of the sense of responsibility to get off the dole and into a job taking care of themselves. But the opportunity does not always exist. Drive east or south of Little Rock. You'll find struggling expanses of no-opportunity that Cotton "represents," using the word somewhat laughably.
Second, the basic Medicaid that existed before Obamacare's expansion of health insurance up to 138 percent of poverty covered, in Arkansas, only up to 38 percent of the poverty level. Restoring Medicaid to that status and putting everyone else on private insurance would mean some poor soul trying to subsist on $8,000 a year would be expected to buy health insurance at his own expense except for, perhaps, subsidies that Koch-addicted Republicans like Cotton want at least to reduce and perhaps to end.
Third, the basic Medicaid that existed before Obamacare's expansion of health insurance up to 138 percent of poverty left state government without hundreds of millions of federal dollars so enriching the state treasury that Republicans like state Rep. Charlie Collins of Fayetteville can do the only thing Republicans know to do, which is cut income taxes.
Fourth, before Medicaid expansion, our rural hospitals were bankrupt or teetering there, providing uncompensated care to poor people going to the emergency room when seriously ill or hurt because they had no means to go to a doctor for checkups.
Why, before Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, it was positively a healthy utopian wonderland throughout this state you ostensibly represent, wasn't it, Tom?
I had a colleague tell me Monday that it was tactically too early for Cotton to show his hand publicly on Medicaid expansion.
Tactically for whom or what? The people he represents? Or his party's cynical machinations?
It is never too early--never--for a U.S. senator ostensibly representing Arkansas to tell the people he ostensibly represents whether he will avail himself of prominent and pivotal private discussions to save or destroy a program vital to the governor of Arkansas, the government budget of Arkansas, the rural hospitals and entire medical infrastructure of Arkansas and the poor people of Arkansas.
Rather than too early, it is well past time.
I've emailed a question to Cotton's press office. It reads as follows: "Does Senator Cotton support Medicaid expansion as it has been embraced by Governor Hutchinson in Arkansas?"
It's a more than fair question. It's an essential question. And it's a fully contextualized question, because Hutchinson has successfully added personal-responsibility and other conservative touches to the program, and is seeking more such flourishes in the form of waivers from a Trump administration that will grant them.
And it's an easy question. You could answer "yes." Or could you answer "no."
I haven't heard anything.
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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 06/06/2017