Strong medicine

LITTLE ROCK — Something interesting—to me, anyway—happened Thursday morning with the Arkansas Democratic Party.

Now there is a sentence I hadn’t expected to write.

Until then, the state’s Democrats had cowered in hopes of avoiding issues and winning a few personal popularity contests for legislative seats in the fall. They had conceded all expressed positions—wrong ones, but popular—to the surging antigovernment Republicans.

The conventional wisdom had become that the people of Arkansas had so lost their minds at a tea party that there was no reasoning with them until the mind-altering brew departed their systems.

But then, on Thursday morning, the state Democrats showed signs of warming toward actually taking an important stand. Signs of life, that is to say.

What happened was that I got bent out of shape that Republican state legislators had argued in a committee meeting on Wednesday that expanding Medicare to the working poor, to 133 percent of the federal poverty level—as provided in federal health-care reform—would simply encourage people to stay poor.

You give a poor man medicine and he’ll just choose to stay sick and poor. That’s the delusional contention, I guess.

I scoffed. And I ranted about this outrage on my blog, at brummett. arkansasonline.com.

Within minutes, I saw that Will Bond, chairman of the Democratic Party, had gone on Twitter and linked that blog rant as if to recommend or conceivably even endorse it.

Well, shut my mouth.

I’d said strong stuff. I’d ridiculed Republican nonsense. I’d unabashedly and unalterably endorsed the Medicaid expansion.

Arkansas Democrats hadn’t been in the habit lately of associating themselves with strong stuff.

They had been intending to hide out until the election in hopes that a few people would remember out of habit how to vote “D.”

Then I went to Bond’s full Twitter feed. I saw that he had previously made a post deploring that one in four working Arkansawyers lacks health insurance. And he’d made another recent post taking note that the Arkansas Hospital Association says we all pay a hidden tax in our healthinsurance premiums.

We do that to cover more than $300 million a year in uncompensated hospital care in Arkansas for people lacking insurance.

What was happening here? Was the state Democratic chairman angling to take a side, a clear one, a right one, for expanding Medicaid?

All I could figure was that Gov. Mike Beebe, who so runs the state party that it won’t go to the bathroom without a hall pass from his office, had applied his cautious pragmatism and decided that the Democrats ought to go all-in on Medicaid expansion.

So I got Bond of the phone and learned the truth was close to that, but not quite.

Bond said his position is that we need to get all the facts out on Medicaid expansion instead of this just-say-no mantra from the state’s Republicans.

And the facts include those woeful statistics about one in four working Arkansans not having health insurance and about all of us having to eat uncompensated hospital care.

So, based on those facts, Bond said, we ought to look seriously at embracing this Medicaid expansion . . . except for one thing.

The hallmark of the Beebe administration has been fiscal responsibility, Bond said. So we need to wait for the governor to get his answer from the federal government on whether the state could take the Medicaid expansion but then pull out later if it ran into a budgetary jam.

I subsequently learned that the governor had already been given a verbal answer by phone that, yes, of course, a state could opt in and then pull out later.

At this writing the governor was waiting for that in writing before making a big deal of it.

But the state convention Saturday, about which I assume you can read in the news section elsewhere in today’s paper, would have been a good time and place to put the Arkansas Democratic Party actually in the arena.

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John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.