Holding the poor hostage

Dear editor:

Per your July 26 report on the city directors’ deliberations concerning County Heath Unit (CHU) funding: I’m not clear whether the $111.6 million city budget passed, but am clear that one director would hold it hostage to avoid the city contributing $45,000 to CHU, and logroll it back as inducement for the county to restore road millage to the city’s $350K benefit. Why? (paraphrasing) “Because we can. Law doesn’t require the city to contribute to CHU.”

So what’s my gripe? It’s the pervasive contempt for the poor and wretched that infects our presumptively Christian nation, encouraging us to kick legislation that affects their welfare around as hard and as randomly as we kick them. Higher government gives us permission that trickles down to us.

Take Congress. Two years ago, I wrote you that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) saved my wife’s life. But ACA may be gutted, and she will again have no coverage. Humanity has broken out among some Republican senators, but I would not take the Senate’s rejection of the “Skinny Repeal” for granted.

All six of Arkansas’ congressional delegation remain implacable authors of the misery that would follow ACA demise, despite knowing better than most the ubiquity of poverty and medical indigence in our state. As to the Arkansas legislature: In May, it took away Medicaid from people 100-128 percent of poverty level, throwing them on the ACA marketplace, which may dissolve anyhow. My two legislative representatives voted for it. But though I wrote them both twice, neither provided an explanation of the bill, of their votes or a reference number to look it up.

Should I then be surprised to see cheap logrolling at the local level that takes hostage a measure that benefits the medically indigent? Need we imitate the methods of higher-level megalomania? Aren’t we bigger than that? Though not required, wont that $45,000 buy a lot of goodwill?

Kudos to County Judge Rick Davis and District 2 JP Thomas Anderson, present at the meeting and expressing similar thoughts. CHU will go on. And putting the tit-for-tat game in its deservedly comical perspective, $45,000 represents only 0.04 percent of city budget, and 2.9 percent of $1.55 million combined county and state funding of CHU.

But staying on point, it seems perfectly OK now at any level of governance to take the poor and wretched hostage for the sake of ideology and extortion.

I won’t dice Scripture with more frequent contributors. Yes, certain passages, with strain, argue that prosperity reflects moral and spiritual superiority, and the poor and wretched get what they deserve. Max Weber’s works point to such passages and their interpretive strain.

Now turn to Strong’s “Exhaustive Concordance” and follow the hundreds of entries for “poor” and its synonyms to their sources: God has a special love for the poor and wretched. There will be consequences for those who abuse them. And people like me, who don’t much go out of their way to help, had better look out, too. Thomas Heckmann Hot Springs