County legislators split on expansion

The state House and possibly the state Senate will likely vote on Arkansas’ recently passed “private option” Medicaid expansion plan, but Garland County legislators are split on how they will likely vote.

The “private option” is basically a plan, which passed the state House and Senate by a bipartisan vote, that lets Arkansans making less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level use federal Medicaid dollars to purchase private insurance.

Based on various media reports, it’s

uncertain if the state Legislature will be able to muster the required 75 votes in the House and 27 in the Senate to continue appropriations for the “private option.”

The House is expected to vote on a slightly altered private option plan that would ban the state from purchasing advertising to promote the program on Tuesday.

“The amendments I wrote and that are now successfully attached to the existing budget bills do many things to reduce the billion dollar spending and to restrain the growth of entitlements and dependency,” state Rep. Nate Bell, R- District 20, said in a statement released on a social media website Thursday night.

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, a Little Rock nonprofit that supports the private option, sent out a statement Wednesday saying the “amendments adopted today are a blatant attempt to create major barriers to the new health coverage plan for low- income Arkansans approved by the Legislature on a bipartisan basis just last year.”

“These amendments could have a chilling effect on outreach and enrollment,” said Rich Huddleston, executive director of AACF.

House Majority Leader Bruce Westerman, R- District 22, said he was still a “strong no” against the program, but said he didn’t know how a possible vote on funding the program would turn out next week.

“I’ve heard lots of scenarios so it is hard to speculate on how it will turn out,” Westerman said. “You might have to get Oaklawn to handicap it.”

The state Senate is still reportedly one vote short of the 27 votes needed to fund the private option.

Citing a recent health care poll he paid for of 386 households in his senate district, state Sen. Bill Sample, R- District 14, said, “I found the answers very enlightening and will be a good guide for me as we work through this issue during the fiscal session. I was especially pleased to see that 82 percent of those surveyed wanted Arkansas to be in control of our health care dollars rather than the federal government,” Sample said in a statement.

The poll asked participants, “Would you rather Arkansas control our state and federal health care dollars or let the federal government control?” and “Each of the plans available through Arkansas’ Private Option has a monthly premium and will provide payment to your local hospitals, doctors and medical clinics. If those payments help your local medical care providers stay in business, would you be in favor of allowing people to pay a premium to buy one of the Private Option plans?” to which 70 percent of the participants said “yes” in response.

Sample said he was “hopeful” the “private option” would get the needed amount of votes in the Senate by the end of next week or the beginning of the week after.

“This plan is as good as we can get,” Sample said. “We are going to work at ( gaining votes) real hard. If it doesn’t pass, they’ve got to be able to to sleep at night knowing they took away these benefits from people.”

State Sen. Alan Clark, R- District 13, of Lonsdale, who previously voted against the private option when it was being debated last year, said he hasn’t changed his mind because the program spends “$ 20 billion dollars we don’t have.”

“Our national deficit is probably the biggest problem we face,” Clark said. “Standing against this is the right thing to do.”

Clark said he had heard from his constituents by an 8- 1 ratio that they opposed the program and that he was still trying to convince other state senators who had previously voted ‘ yes’ to switch their upcoming vote on the private option to a ‘ no’ vote.

“( Private option supporters) are still looking for one more vote and I’m still looking for a couple more for insurance,” Clark said.

Rep. David Kizzia, D- District 26, of Malvern, told The Sentinel- Record in January he thought the “private option” was a better alternative than traditional Medicaid expansion.

“It was the best option I had,” Kizzia said. “When push comes to shove, I’m going to do what I can to help local hospitals.”