I'd relay to you everything U.S. Sen. John Boozman told me about the health-care issue Wednesday, except that the publisher and I would be left with about 20 inches of white space.
I heard that. An improvement, you say.
Let me first fill a chunk of space telling you instead what a nice man Boozman is.
He's consummately nice. Soft-spoken. Meek. Gentle. Unaffected. Unpretentious. Decent. Genuine.
It's not just that he's low-profile in the U.S. Senate. He'd be low-profile in any coffee club over at Starbucks.
I recall his U.S. Senate race in 2010 when Boozman's campaign manager, the same Sarah Huckabee Sanders now famous as deputy press secretary to the preposterous second-place president, sat in for him in a debate.
She wiped the floor with the field in a way Boozman wouldn't have dared. If it was an authentic Arkansas character you wanted, she said, then they didn't get any more pure-dee Arkansas than John Boozman.
She may not have been right about anything since, but she was right then.
There was that time when Ted Cruz got so obnoxious in a Republican Senate caucus meeting that even Boozman, they said, raised his voice toward him.
That's as hard to imagine of Boozman as it is easy to believe of Cruz.
How do I say this? Just straight, I guess. Boozman is not a forceful action-taker, policy-designer or attention-seeker. He's the anti-Cotton, as in Tom.
He tends to his constituency and pretty much votes as Mitch McConnell wishes. He doesn't fill up a room when he enters, like some of the politicians. He just kind of occupies it.
What happened Tuesday was that he was a splash on social media. Really. He was.
Robert Costa of the Washington Post put on Twitter that Boozman had told him, "Arkansas and its governor would very much like to keep the [Medicaid] expansion."
Later a reporter for the New York Times followed up to say that not even Cotton, an outspoken critic of the House health-care plan that ends Medicaid expansion, had been so clear and forceful on Medicaid expansion.
But Boozman hadn't been clear or forceful. All he'd said was that Gov. Asa Hutchinson and the people of Arkansas liked the private option, now called Arkansas Works. He hadn't said how he felt about it.
On the phone with me at my request the next day, Boozman said this fellow from the Post had hit him up in the corridor and asked him if his state had expanded Medicaid and how he felt about it, and he had answered.
Yes, his state has expanded Medicaid. That was the first part of the answer.
And the governor back home and the people seem to like it. That was the second part of the answer.
My question, then, was what did John Boozman think about it?
We're close enough to the end of the space that I can finish with what the state's senior senator said.
Boozman said this was complex. He said we need to get this right rather than get it quick. He said Medicaid is very important to Arkansas. He said, yes, certainly, the issue is important to the governor.
But he said the Senate is 52-48 in favor of the Republicans, and there are Republicans who kind of like some form of Medicaid expansion but there also are those who don't like it all. So, you know, 52-48 means it's going to be hard whatever we do.
And there's a finite amount of money, you see.
I interrupted: Yes, but, senator, I know all that. You're giving me an excellent on-site report of what others are doing and are thinking. But what I'm asking you is what you think yourself about Medicaid expansion.
Had the governor sensitized him to the problem of moving lower-income working people off Medicaid to save money, as the governor would like, but having no system of fair and adequate subsidies to sustain affordability for health care for those people in the private market?
Well, about that, Boozman said the governor's concern was certainly an important consideration and that he would be talking more with the governor about that, and, you know, keep in mind that part of this issue is that Obamacare is in a death spiral on premiums and deductibles and Aetna says so.
He said one in three people in Arkansas uses Medicaid, and, you know, that's a lot.
It's about a third, sounds to me like.
I apologized to the nice senator, by the way, if my questioning seemed at any point impatient.
He told me that was all right and that I surely had a lot to write about these days.
I said yes, I do.
But not so much today, it turned out.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 03/26/2017