A sick feeling

The most telling remark during the legislative panel discussion Wednesday at the state rural development conference came from under the breath of state Sen. Joyce Elliott of Little Rock, liberal lioness of Arkansas.

Doing my annual turn as moderator of the discussion, I happened to be standing next to Elliott as she committed her muttering. I was alone, I suspect, in hearing what she said. “I’m sick of it.”

—————— I had just asked state Sen. Jim Hendren of Sulphur Springs, co-chairman of the task force to oblige right-wing nonsense and replace the private-option form of Medicaid expansion that is working ideally, what it was about the private option that was broken and in need of repair or replacement.

He had replied, essentially, that I ought to shut up and get over it.

What he actually said was that the law had been passed to end the private option and concoct something else and that there was nothing to be gained now by my insistence on trying to “re-litigate” the matter.

So then I’d asked Sen. Jonathan Dismang of Beebe, president pro tem and one of the acclaimed architects of the nationally acclaimed innovation we call the private option, what he made of the matter. As a Republican legislative leader trying to negotiate his illogical right flank and oblige the governor of his party who is trying to negotiate his illogical right flank, Dismang finessed his way through a response. He essentially said he agreed with Hendren that re-litigation was pointless at this juncture.

So then I asked other legislators on the panel to weigh in, and, to my surprise, none did.

That’s when I heard Elliott grumble quietly that she was sick of it.

Immediately upon adjournment of our 90-minute session, I turned to her and asked why in the wide world a liberal such as herself would be sick of the private option with its successful dispatching of federal money to add nearly a quarter-million poor Arkansans to Medicaid.

She said, oh, no, she wasn’t sick of the private option. She said she was sick of talking about the wholly avoidable, utterly pointless—and inevitable—tragedy of ending it through this nonsensical task force contrivance.

As I left, two officials of Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield implored me to keep hammering on that which Hendren prefers that I shut up about.

Blue Cross rather likes having federal money used to deliver paying customers to it.

As we’ve discussed in this space before, Hendren calls that an “artificial market” in that it injects federal taxpayer money to change the private-market dynamic.

Hendren thinks that is a negative thing, though the Legislature will convene Tuesday for a special session to put state taxpayers into debt to subsidize a multibillion-dollar corporation.

And get this: Our state taxpayer subsidy will aid Lockheed Martin in its plan to build and sell equipment to the Pentagon in a transaction to be executed with federal taxpayer money.

That is to say the Lockheed Martin matter is one of the artificiality of taxpayer money coming and going. A monstrous private profiteer will use our state taxes to get some of our federal taxes. And we will specifically authorize that.

And then we will return to destroying the private option because using federal money to insure poor people, bail out hospitals and fortify our private insurance market is supposedly ill-advised.

I believe I will respectfully decline to shut up about that. I think I’m going to keep on keeping on in my re-litigation, even if Jim Hendren doesn’t like it and even if Jonathan Dismang would rather finesse it and even if Joyce Elliott is sick of the tragic futility of it.

peaking of not shutting up: I also asked about this talk of dedicating part of the state general-revenue surplus to highways, a horrible idea.

Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, like Hendren an Asa Hutchinson nephew, rightly assessed the lack of practical wisdom in the proposal. But he said maybe we could use for highways the money we’re soon to get from the discontinuation of tens of millions of state dollars in settlement payments in the Little Rock school desegregation case.

So I pointed out that Mike Beebe had passed legislation to activate that money when it is freed to complete his elimination of the grocery tax. Then Hutchinson and House Speaker Jeremy Gillam said we could always undo that old law.

Allow me then to close as follows: If this Legislature were to take away a pending food-tax cut from the people—the ones subsidizing Lockheed Martin and then paying to buy the subsidized product—and then divert the proceeds to highways that ought to get funded exclusively by highway user charges, which these legislators are afraid to raise, then I’d be like Joyce Elliott. Sick of it.