Setting standard for cruelty

The Arkansas purges of nearly a half-million Medicaid recip- ients over the last six months are not as draconian as they sound. Or at least we can certainly hope that is the case.

But the gleeful rhetoric of the Sarah Sanders administration is, as usu- al, every bit as harsh, misleading and cynical as it sounds.

Folks running Arkansas right now certainly know how to talk tough. But they are not so tough. A 39-inch lectern has them scared speechless. But that is for another update soon.

It is at least a little draconian to chuck 427,000 persons off the Medicaid rolls, speaking for those who have been axed without knowing it though they are still fully eligible.

More than half of those purged got that fate not because they were no longer qualified, necessarily. It was because they did not know or understand that they needed to re-prove their eligibility with filled-out documents sent to them for completing and submitting.

Surely some of those 427,000 had moved to another state or raised their income to an ineligible level. Or they had been part of the pandemic-driven expansion and were aware they were not eligible otherwise.

Some surely had gone to the clinic or hospital and been re-enrolled when they found out they had no insurance anymore. Some children—many, we can hope—had no doubt shown up in the medical system and been automatically moved to the ARKids First program.

But, just as surely, there are poor people out there not aware that they and their kids are walking around without the health insurance they had the last time they were at the clinic or hospital.

It is all because the federal government reasonably decided it was time to roll back the pandemic-related expansion of Medicaid and gave states 10 months, and then four months more, to get that done.

But in Arkansas, which is a chronic high-performer among states in poverty-insensitivity, a special state law set a six-month deadline for eligibility terminations.

One person in Arkansas wrote that determining eligibility in six months did not necessarily mean purging everyone in six months. He thought it could permit taking a little more time to locate the unlocated. You can determine eligibility but give a grace period.

But that was a newspaper columnist easy to ignore.

So, Arkansas led the nation in the rate of purging as a percentage of the population.

Let us consider the relevant words in that regard of Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families. She is easily dismissible around here by our new conservative Republican policymakers on the basis that Bill Clinton went to Georgetown, so you cannot believe a word coming from that liberally indoctrinating place.

Alker told the Associated Press: “Arkansas has distinguished itself by moving very rapidly to kick families off coverage, regardless of whether they are still eligible.”

There is no trophy for that. There is only an opportunity for Republican high-fives.

Kristi Putnam, the Sanders agent who runs the state Human Services Department, boasted, “Medicaid resources should go to Arkansans who qualify for them, and not for those who are ineligible. I’m proud of the work that staff across our entire agency performed over the last six months to ensure that our program is serving only those who truly need Medicaid.”

Putnam’s is a statement without reference to—much less sensitivity to—people purged purely on a paperwork basis.

And that mindset is the real offensiveness in this affair. It is good and right to work to make sure only eligible Arkansans are getting health-care assistance. Hardworking taxpayers should not pay a dollar in premiums for able-bodied couch potatoes sitting around in posh mobile homes watching streaming TV until it is time to get the wellness check-up.

But it is a curious form of Arkansas machismo to boast of having taken health insurance away faster, meaning more hastily, than anyone else, and of having done so only on a procedural basis for most of those—and then to be proud of the hastiness.

There is, in Arkansas, a loyal if futile opposition. State Democratic Party chairman Grant Tennille gathered a few of the already-few Democratic state legislators last week for a news conference on the Medicaid situation.

Of the Sandersite’s boast about covering only the eligible and no one else, Tennille said, “To say the only people left on the rolls are those who truly need Medicaid—you either don’t understand the program you run, or you’re lying to the people of Arkansas.”

I suspect the Sanders administration understands the program. Appreciating or caring about it … those are the issues.

And I find “lying” an uncomfortable word. I prefer “blowing rightwing smoke because it has been demonstrated for now to work at the polling place.”