Not Just The Poor To Pay On New State Health Plan

It was inevitable.

Even those who voted against the Private Option time and time again since 2010, knew that one day the Arkansas hybrid plan to help the low income, poor and uninsured — estimated at almost 500,000 citizens in our state — would end.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson and a minority of the state legislators are making good on that promise today and they are acting like it was their idea. It was not. This past week, Hutchinson was again speaking out very boldly as the state’s top elected administrator — this time to the Medicaid Providers meeting at the Embassy Suites in Little Rock. He minced few words and enacted some of his “Hollywood-style lines” to the listening audience.

He didn’t say the old ‘read my lips,’ line from George Herbert Walker Bush — but he almost did.

“Please understand very carefully that on Dec. 31, 2016, the private option ends,” he said, pausing for emphasis and finished with, “... The private option ends.”

Silence echoed off the walls as his deliberately placed whispered oration bounced around the hushed room.

Hutchinson is playing to the anti-Obamacare crowd with this very disingenuous ploy — acting as if he is in fact drawing a line in the sand on the Arkansas Private Option.

Indeed that line in the sand was voted on by the majority of Arkansas lawmakers at Hutchinson’s behest to continue this program over a year ago to extend the Private Option.

And if Hutchinson and the anti- Private Option, anti-Obamacare legislators were honest, they would also admit they knew the Private Option would end Dec. 31, 2016, and stop acting as though they have recently killed off this program.

Most of the remarks Hutchinson made this past week were of wholesale changes coming to the state of Arkansas, through and by the federal Medicaid program works.

Before everyone gets all hyped up on what the new program will be called: “Arkansas Works,” please note that several states — Tennessee is one that immediately comes to mind — has called their Private Option or Obamacare alternative a similar name, “Tennessee Works.”

So see, the “Arkansas Works,” moniker is just that — more government gobbledygook PR slogan to get rid of saying “Private Option” or the most dreaded of all monikers “Obamacare.”

What Hutchinson and other conservative GOP members want to do is make the working poor pay something for their insurance coverage provided by the state with the federal government’s money it grants to the states. Yes, that is right. The state is still taking millions of federal dollars and converting those dollars to premiums for health insurance for those who cannot afford themselves to pay for health insurance in Arkansas.

Now Hutchinson wants to give “political cover” to those in the Legislature who oppose such methods be it called “Arkansas Works,” “Private Option,” or “Obamacare.”

Hutchinson thinks that everyone needs to pay a little.

How little? He does not know.

How will they pay? He does not know.

Will the state DHS start taking monthly payments for health insurance? I doubt it. Will the state ask employers to start deducting monthly payments for state sponsored health insurance for their employees?

Yes. That may in fact happen.

If a small business that cannot afford to cost-share or provide health insurance for its own employees, very soon, that business may be mandated by the state to withhold these sums from employees paychecks to ensure they have continued health care provided by the state and federal government under a new “Arkansas Works,” program.

How else will the money be collected and accounted for?

Mr. and Mrs. Small Business get ready for some real wholesale changes you did not ask for from a program that you did not endorse. Everyone needs to pay. That is how the proposed Hutchinson version of “Arkansas Works,” will apparently work. Everyone needs to pay. Think on that. Everyone needs to pay.