When a penny-ante operator is caught swindling Medicaid, he risks being caught, convicted and maybe incarcerated, mere "white-collar" criminal though he be. Then it's off to the hoosegow with him! But let a respectable governor like The Hon. Asa Hutchinson propose adding hundreds of thousands of additional beneficiaries to the Medicaid rolls, and he's a reformer complete with a legislative agenda.
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. But in politics, that kind of candor could be the end of a successful career. It might make a great news story, but it's no way to get ahead. It would be like Donald Trump saying something sane, or Bill Clinton telling the truth.
Governor Hutchinson would expand the Medicaid rolls by another 267,000 Arkansans--over the objections of legislators like Terry Rice (R-Waldron). But how long can the Old Guard continue to stay on guard against all these verbal games when a term like Private Option has come to mean a public one?
As for the federal government--that's you and me, fellow taxpayer--it's agreed to pay the full cost of this expansion of Medicaid, but only until next year, when the state's share begins to kick in at the rate of 5 percent a year till it reaches 10 percent by 2020, or only four years from now.
Got all that? The Brits call it paying on the never-never, though never is never supposed to get here yet somehow does, like the balloon payment on a mortgage. Shades of the old days when your friendly neighborhood drug dealer handed out free samples till his customers were forever hooked.
Naturally enough, every special interest with a stake in federal largesse is all for heading down this downhill slope. Name your own favorite, from county hospitals to local medical societies. UAMS, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, would be out $65 million a year from patients who would wind up having to pay more of their own way--but UAMS could hope to make it up by cutting items like non-emergency care for the poor. Despite popular opinion to the contrary, crime doesn't always pay, even if it goes by a more elevated name.
"The fact is," says state Senator Kim Hendren (R-Sulphur Springs), "we got a quarter-million people in Arkansas right now making health-care decisions based on a policy we passed three years ago." At last someone has mentioned a fact, and not just another assumption.
But official policy will doubtless change again by the time another three years have gone by. For few things are so temporary as still another "permanent" fix our governments state, federal and local have devised that will take care of all our problems.
O Reform! What crimes are committed in thy name! Give us honest corruption any time.
------------v------------
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 04/13/2016