Invitation to a block party

— Maybe we could raise Orval Faubus from the dead so that he could call out the Arkansas National Guard to stand between our state’s people and health insurance.

Or perhaps outright secession, having worked so well for us in the early 1860s, provides the better idea.

We hold such a proud and glorious history in Arkansas in regard to politically regressive defiance of the federal law of the land.

Roby Brock’s Talk Business and Hendrix College ran an automated poll Thursday night of nearly 600 respondents in Arkansas. It asked, among other things, whether those polled wanted to “continue trying to block” implementation of health-care reform now that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the individual mandate.

Here is what came back: 58 percent said to continue trying to block the law while only 34 percent wanted to concede and obey it.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public schools had to be integrated racially. In 1957, then-Gov. Faubus called out the National Guard to block integration at Little Rock Central High School. President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to occupy the area around our local high school and force Arkansas to stop breaking the law.

Knowing Gov. Mike Beebe as I do, I do not expect him to dispatch the National Guard to stand in front of the door of Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

But knowing Arkansas Republican legislators as I do, I wonder if maybe they won’t.

———

All of the preceding amounted to a bit of a rant. It was mildly hyperbolic, exaggerated to make a point.

Wanting to “block” health insurance is not quite as evil as racism, if nearly as nonsensical.

These poll respondents probably wanted resistance, not defiance. Their only option in this survey was the word “block.”

Brock tells me the phrasing was taken from polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

But if I see the word “block” in regard to a locally unpopular Supreme Court decision that grants new opportunities for disadvantaged people, I tend to see Elizabeth Eckford.

She’s purely innocent, elegantly brave and tragically frightened. All she is trying to do is go to school as the Supreme Court has said she could. She gets abused and assailed by primitive people in apparent greater need than her of an education, and certainly further from innocence and bravery.

In 1957, we needed a yet-unexisting Pink Floyd to perform our state song, “We Don’t Need No Education.”

Now we need the group to record “We Don’t Need No Health Insurance.”

By 46 percent to 42 percent, Brock’s respondents said they did not want the state to choose to expand Medicaid to a quarter-million of its uninsured working poor people, as provided for in the health-reform law.

The expansion would be done using full federal funding for three years and a 90-10 federal match thereafter that would produce hundreds of millions of dollars in new economic activity and actual state government savings.

What we apparently want, not unlike in 1957, is a good letting-alone so we can go about our regressive business as we choose.

We want tens of thousands of our people, constituting a higher percentage of the population than most states, to walk around without health insurance. We want the taxpayers to cover their costs if these uninsured people get rolled into an emergency room with something having gone expensively wrong, like a car accident or a stroke.

At its most benign, our resistance is that we don’t believe the federal government can afford these new expenditures. So we seem to be willing to sacrifice unilaterally in pursuit of a reduced federal budget deficit.

Actually, though, we could keep John Boozman on the Senate Agriculture Committee and let all this come out pretty much even.

What we federally spend in Arkansas for Medicaid for poor people would be offset by what we save in declining federal aid for our farmers. That’s because Boozman stands idly by while corn and wheat farmers in the Midwest fill his representative vacuum and take that money.

Brock’s poll also found that as many respondents as not favored the legalization of marijuana for medicinal purposes if prescribed by a doctor and purchased from a regulated nonprofit organization.

Others were surprised by that finding. But I wasn’t.

We’re an unhealthy culture in Arkansas. We defer to doctors even if we don’t have the money to go to them much.

We cling to our medicine for our pain.

So if an exalted doctor thinks a little “wildwood weed” might take your mind off your suffering, then we’ll trust his infinite wisdom.

To summarize, in Arkansas we want to be able to smoke a doobie so long as it’s not covered by insurance.

———◊-———

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

Editorial, Pages 13 on 07/24/2012

Upcoming Events