Bah, who needs the poor?

News items: Democrats in Congress have asked the Trump administration to stop all plans for work requirements for Medicaid based on the failed pioneering experience in Arkansas. And providers of mental health services in Arkansas have filed suit in Little Rock to argue that a new cost-cutting system of managed care set to begin Friday is ill-prepared to assure the current quality of treatment.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s Arkansas has about had it with all these needy people. Among our state’s currently ruling Republican elite, there seems to exist a prevailing resentment of the poor, sick and disabled.

It could be expressed this way: How will we ever transform Arkansas into a conservative low-tax mecca—a model society in the new Trumpian America—with all these pitiful people holding out their hands?

We’ve been using taxpayer money to help poor people for decades. Yet poor people persist. They still rely on those of us who have pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps of not being born into poor and culturally disadvantaged cultures.

We had the good sense to go to good colleges like Bob Jones and Ecclesia.

Now, right on cue, liberals mostly from out-of-state have started shedding crocodile tears for our needy people.

Lawyers mostly from out-of-state have started chasing our ambulances.

And media people mostly out-ofstate, but not entirely, have started wringing their creepy little typing hands with their creepy little typing fingers. They’re belly-aching about supposedly helpless people losing their health insurance, or mentally unhealthy people having their care turned over to bean-counter management companies so that we can afford tax cuts at the high-income level.

Now we have liberal lawyers in Washington with a lawsuit in a D.C. court arguing something that is none of their business—that we shouldn’t be allowed to require our poor people to complete the 400-meter intermediate hurdles to stay on Medicaid if that’s what we want to do.

Now we have self-interested mental health providers going into court in Little Rock—which is liberal and not the real Arkansas—to try to keep us from turning over their clients’ reimbursements to a cost-saving managed-care system.

Now we have the foreign press— not even American, much less Arkansan—coming here to talk to some guy who lost his drug coverage and claims a pharmacy told him his pill is going to cost him hundreds of dollars.

Maybe the guy should have thought of that before he decided to have no job when he got sick.

Maybe he ought to spend less time bothering his pharmacist and more time driving around looking for a job. He is fully welcome to fill up his gas tank at 6 cents more a gallon so we can pay for the roads we’ve been kind enough to build for his convenience.

Now Democrats in Congress have taken to writing public letters decrying that Arkansas has thrown nearly 20,000 people off Medicaid for not running the hurdles.

They claim we can’t account for these purged persons—that we can’t prove, as if we ought to have to prove to anybody, that these people have legitimately moved away or found jobs or picked up health insurance because their spouses got jobs.

We know everything we need to know about these people, thank you.

We didn’t really make them run any hurdles. We simply told them to get to a computer and click a mouse to vouch that they had a job or were actively seeking one or doing volunteer work. We gave them three solid months to negotiate our portal, which was functioning at least some of the time.

And they didn’t have gumption enough over 90 days to run that arrow up to that computer square and click.

We don’t have enough money to hire people to see if they’re actually working. We’re cutting taxes around here. All we asked of them was to climb out of the couch, mute Judge Judy or Dr. Phil for a minute or two, and sign on to a computer.

Then, because of all the whining, we let them report by phone. All poor people have phones. We heard on Fox that Obama gave everybody a welfare phone.

Now we’ve got people saying Arkansas is getting a bad reputation.

When has Arkansas not had a bad reputation?

Arkansas had a good-enough reputation that Sam Walton, with nothing more than a few thriving five-anddimes, was able to build the world’s richest mass merchandiser. His descendants, armed with nothing more than the billions they inherited, were able to build a world-class art museum.

That’s how you transform a place, with rich people.

You don’t transform a place by checking the blood pressure of poor people.

If we can get taxes down by throwing a few more freeloaders off health insurance, then we’ll be taking our bad reputation all the way to the bank.