Gov. Asa Hutchinson told reporters Monday that people shouldn’t panic over the Republican health care bill in the U.S. Senate.
He said Tom Cotton is working on it (not that you could tell it) and that sometimes you can’t save people from their own bad decisions.
I don’t feel any better.
Arkansas ought to panic. Any person in Arkansas with an elected responsibility who isn’t panicking is probably selling out his state to his party and its devilish deal with Donald Trump.
Among the 50 states, Arkansas has a greater per capita need for Medicaid for poor people — whether children or the disabled or the asset-depleted elderly or merely the everyday and abysmally impoverished — than all but one or two.
The Republican bill in the Senate would reduce Medicaid to a strictly budgeted block grant. It would phase out, by 2023, the Medicaid expansion for health insurance for the poor that has been a smashing success in Arkansas. It would inordinately imperil, in Arkansas, the needy, the rural hospitals, the rural economy and the state government budget.
Our putative savior, Cotton, and the state’s other Republican senator, John Boozman, have been saying they don’t have a position on the bill. That’s a smug and cynical tactic exercised in deference to their party’s political need in Washington. It de-prioritizes their constituents’ human need. It’s representational malpractice.
Louisiana, which shares characteristics and needs with Arkansas, has a freshman Republican senator, Bill Cassidy. He said Monday that Medicaid expansion was very important to his state and that he thus was troubled by his party’s bill.
Only in comparison to our guys, Cotton and Boozman, would such banal belaboring of the obvious amount to statesmanship.
And for our mostly responsible governor, Hutchinson, to breeze back from an overseas trade trip to say worry not because this isn’t law yet and Cotton is on the job and some people are just too stupid to help themselves … well, the Louisianan’s banal belaboring of the obvious is looking statesmanlike in comparison to that as well.
In a way, Asa was merely explaining the basic difference between Democrats who passed Obamacare and his party that won’t keep its promise to repeal it but will merely screw it up royally.
Democrats believe everyone is better off if health insurance is universal and that, if mandating that people get coverage is the way to move in that direction, then the mandate is the way to go.
Republicans believe people must be free to live their lives without regard for anybody else.
What Asa was saying was that, gosh sakes, it’s too bad that some people don’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain or get some darned health insurance. But, you see, that’s just the way it goes in a free society and free-market economy.
Yes, he lamented, some people will use their freedom to decline to do what’s best for them.
But the people who will go without health insurance if the Republican bill becomes law will most likely be something more basic than stupid or irresponsible. They’ll be broke.
They’ll be the ones who don’t have any money to pay their premium portions or co-pays or deductibles when the Republicans throw them off Medicaid expansion — a quarter-million or so in Arkansas — and send them into the marketplace with a tax credit and the great American freedom of choice to buy a $5,000 deductible health insurance policy with their annual income of $13,000.
The math doesn’t work even if they don’t get sick.
If they get sick, they’ll need for the illness to be serious enough to cost them the $5,000 they don’t have, because, after that, actual insurance would kick in — partially.
So, all the leading Trumpians in Arkansas — Hutchinson, Cotton, Boozman, the four forgettable delegates to the House of Representatives — are telling us to be calm and passive because all of this will be fine.
That’s because they behold Trump’s approval rating in Arkansas and, in the face of it, lack the nerve, courage and independence to say even a single discouraging word against the all-consuming desire for a victory lap by this massive ego disorder that is grotesquely the president of the United States.
He is grotesque in that he thinks of policy only in the way of a gone-wild Charlie Sheen, meaning for the sole purpose of … winning.
The catchphrase I was hearing Monday was that our state’s Republicans were monitoring the issue.
That’s all Arkansas needs in Washington — somebody to monitor what’s going on, isn’t it? We didn’t think we were electing people to fight for our side, did we?
Political representatives in Washington who monitor an issue are like Razorback football players who spend the game sitting in the press box keeping a close eye on the scoreboard.
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.