If you're between 30 and 49 and on the Arkansas Works health insurance program under Medicaid expansion, all you had to do last week was punch up a YouTube video on your iPhone 8 or iPad or laptop or desktop computer.
Then all you had to do was follow the video's instructions to execute the half-dozen or more mouse clicks to enroll on the work-requirement portal by which you would then verify monthly that you were working at a job or trying to find a job or were properly exempted from having to do that.
Nothing to it. Your standard poor person on Medicaid in Arkansas could set aside five minutes to get it done and have three minutes left to thumb the smartphone with a few pro-Trump Facebook posts under contract with the Russian government.
I jest, though this is not a jesting matter.
Poor people might not possess the latest digital devices or easy access to them or competent command of them. They, being culturally disadvantaged owing to an absence of economic opportunity, might not even know about this waiver from the Trump administration allowing Arkansas to require them to work or look for work.
Because many poor people tend to live a necessarily transient existence, they may not have received any communication from the state or Blue Cross and Blue Shield telling them that, because they are ages 30 to 49, they were in phase one of the new program and thus needed to get their requisite computer clicking done by the deadline Thursday night.
I continue to contend that, under this so-called work requirement, more poor people will lose health insurance for failure to click than for failure to have a job or seek one.
It's mostly a Web-proficiency requirement imposed on the least among us in a state that is ranked 49th in Internet connectivity.
The requirement is for 80 hours of work or work-related activity a month. You can click to claim 31 of those hours by asserting that you were looking for work. For the other 49 hours, you can assert that you were volunteering at church or for some charity service.
The state says it will do "spot audits," meaning it might check out the veracity of your clicked claim. But, considering that we're talking about tens of thousands of people and a handful of auditors, it also might not.
All of this will be borne out only if the work requirement survives a lawsuit. One didn't survive the other day in Kentucky, which beat Arkansas for the first waiver for a work requirement but not with implementing the first program.
That ignominy is all ours.
Kentucky's program was thrown out by a federal judge citing the very purpose of Medicaid under its original law, which is to expand medical coverage to as many qualifying people as possible.
Medicaid, by design, is not a welfare-to-work program. It exists for people of such extreme poverty that they can't afford health care any other way. The problem with presuming to compel those people to work or seek work is that the penalty for noncompliance is to leave them without medical treatment, which is a tad harsh even for a mean state like ours.
Prison inmates get better treatment. Get convicted of murder and receive an antibiotic for your bacterial affection. Be poor and fail to click your computer and get denied your medicine--that seems not altogether equal under the law, but cruel and unusual, the conditions of punishment our society claims by the Constitution to deplore and eschew.
I'm told that groups behind the Kentucky lawsuit are now turning their attention to Arkansas. I call on them to hurry.
The newly dominant right-wing policymakers in Arkansas seem to resent poverty and to blame victims for it.
They see it as a personal failing of character that one wasn't born into money, or reared with an education ethic, or blessed with residence in a prosperous region, or favored with personal associations by which one might marry into money.
It leads to a juxtaposition of values-based positions such as those to which I referred last week. State Republicans found themselves calling for the indulgence of due process for a Republican state legislator who hadn't filed income-tax returns while, at the same time, standing firm on a Web-proficiency deadline imposed against poor people.
Three months of failure to do a mouse click and you're out of health care without a hearing. Fifteen years of failure to file a state income-tax return and you may stay in the Legislature until you receive due process.
That's a contemporary Arkansas values-based priority.
These legislators who think poor people on Medicaid are ripping them off ... they ought to give up their per diems and move to the Delta to try living with Medicaid, food stamps and a box fan for the hour or two they could stand it.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 07/08/2018