See the lede story on Wednesday's front page ("307,878 listed on expanded Medicaid rolls"). That story might have been right at home in our Celia Storey's delightful column repackaging old news for today's readers. For once again the state's Medicaid program is expanding, and once again the insurance premiums that taxpayers will be expected to pay for it are on the rise.
Now even Arkansas' governor, The Hon. Asa Hutchinson, who's regularly touted all this in the past, appears to be having second and better thoughts. "We're concerned about the growing numbers and controlling costs . . ." he now concedes, noting that important reforms are coming. Let's certainly hope.
Come next year, expect more of the same. Because that's when the state's share of the cost will kick in at 5 percent, then go up every year thereafter till it hits 10 percent some four years from now. It's an old rule of economics--there is no such thing as a free lunch--that the state's voters and taxpayers have been urged to ignore for far too long. But the piper will have to be paid eventually. And eventually is right around the corner. As faithful readers doubtless will have noticed.
Other old rules of economics are still very much in force, too. They include the ones about how people will behave when given a choice between supposedly free benefits and having to pay for them out of their own pockets. Or as they say, if you think medical care is expensive now, just wait till it's free.
Listen to state Representative Charlie Collins of Fayetteville, who's been chairing the legislative committee studying this ever-growing Frankenstein's Monster of a program. He notes that enrollees in it needn't make a co-payment when they go to the emergency rooms of hospitals, so naturally they do so in ever larger numbers. Which only increases the pressure on those hospitals. As if hospitals didn't face troubles enough already. One of the many morals of this story is that, when folks are offered a service that's supposedly free, of course they'll use more of it.
Here's one other old rule--or maybe just folk saying: Even a blind hog can find an acorn now and then. So it should come as no surprise when Jason Rapert, the Republican legislator from Bigelow, Ark., says something sensible. In this case: "There's a point at which I think it tests the resolve of any of us to support something that is so insane as what is happening here." Well, not clinically or legally insane, but just in the bright light of economic reality, it's certainly crazy. There's a difference.
To quote Friedrich Hayek, economist-cum-philosopher of another century: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." Like a cost-free Medicaid program in the guise of a private option. There are certain iron rules of economics that will not bend despite the best (or worst) efforts of politicians and bureaucrats to make them something other than what they are and will stay.
Innocent Reader reader might as well believe that Donald Trump is temperamentally suited to be president of the United States, or that Colin Powell was the one responsible for Hillary Clinton's surfeit of email servers, or any of the other fairy tales being circulated this disappointing election year. On closer inspection, all those fairy tales turn out to be horror stories.
At last, ever-changing count, this expanded and relabeled Medicaid program had signed up another 50,000 or so Arkansans by the end of last month. And their numbers are sure to increase. To paraphrase that renowned economist Bette Davis in a classic movie, fasten your seat belts; it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Editorial on 08/25/2016