The contents of the Republican-conceived health care bill in the U.S. Senate had not even been revealed when demonstrators showed up at the offices of Arkansas' two senators last week.
The next day the Senate's rewrite of the House's American Health Care Act, developed in secrecy, was finally released.
As many predicted, it proposed staggering cuts to Medicaid, millions fewer Americans with health insurance and less coverage for millions more.
Clearly the people who showed up at the senators' offices (and the roughly 1,000 Arkansans who signed postcards delivered to the senators) last week, had been right to try again to impress on Sens. John Boozman and Tom Cotton just how devastating potential Medicaid cuts would be to this state's people.
The damage isn't just to individuals who may lose coverage. This plan threatens Arkansas hospitals, nursing homes and other health care providers, which in turn affects the well-being of entire communities.
The Arkansas senators' immediate response to the new bill was that they were studying it, apparently prepping for the Senate vote that could come as quickly as this week.
So far, neither Boozman nor Cotton has indicated whether he will vote for the controversial legislation, even though Cotton supposedly had a direct hand in drafting it.
Cotton was one of 11 senators who reportedly met privately, excluding other senators of both parties, to come up with this version, which even senators are struggling to understand before the planned Senate vote.
It would cause millions of Americans not to have health insurance at all and millions more to have less coverage than they have now -- if they can afford it.
The bill would allow insurers to charge older people five times as much as younger people, up from three times as much under the House bill.
The House bill, a "mean" bill as President Trump labeled it, is mean enough. The Senate bill appears to be worse.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on Monday released its forecast for the bill, finding that by the end of the coming decade, 49 million Americans will be uninsured under the Senate bill. The number compares to an expected 28 million people who would be uninsured under existing law (the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare) during the same time frame.
Who knows how many would be impacted in Arkansas?
Remember, more than 300,000 Arkansans have gotten health-care coverage under the state's hybrid Medicaid expansion program, funded mostly with federal money.
This Senate bill would cut federal Medicaid spending by $772 billion over the coming decade, according to the just-released Congressional Budget Office analysis.
That can only spell trouble for Arkansans dependent on Medicaid.
This state, with its sizable population of aging and poor, is among the states that expanded Medicaid, enabling far more families and individuals in this state to have health insurance.
That happened under the Affordable Care Act.
Arkansas did the expansion its own way, with blessings from the federal government. The state's Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, and its Republican-controlled Legislature have embraced the program, although some did so reluctantly.
They made changes in the program and renamed it, but they have relied on the Medicaid money to keep struggling Arkansas families insured.
That's why demonstrations like the one in Little Rock last week have been happening for months now, why so many Arkansas people have been writing and calling their U.S. representatives and senators to register their concern.
If the potential cuts to Medicaid don't affect you directly, they do affect someone you know. Perhaps it is a child, disabled from birth, or an aging parent or grandparent. Medicaid may mean life or death for them.
The senators have had to look such constituents in the eye during this long debate.
Cotton famously heard the pleas of a young woman at a Springdale town hall who told him from her wheelchair that she will die without health care services she currently receives.
She is not the only one whose stories need to be heard. She and so many more are what this debate over health care is really about.
A news commentator said on Monday that what happens in the U.S. Senate in these next days will be a defining moment for all senators, a test of conscience and character.
It definitely will be that for Cotton and for Boozman. Pay attention to what they do and hold them accountable.
Commentary on 06/28/2017