Attorney General Leslie Rutledge latched herself onto a lawsuit that wins her plaudits from Arkansas voters yet would harm inordinately the state and its people.
That's just politics Arkansas-style, circa 2018, when a paragraph isn't true unless it contradicts.
That is not to invoke the tired and elitist cliché that Arkansas voters don't have the good sense to vote in their best interest. It's to say that Arkansas voters know what they don't like, and a great majority of them don't like the Affordable Care Act.
They think it's an oppressive government mandate and that health insurance premiums have shot up unfairly and unsustainably because of it.
A statesman might try to persuade them differently--by invoking a broader human need; by explaining that things would be worse without the law, and that things are better in Arkansas already than they are in other states.
But that's a difficult political sell and the current Arkansas attorney general ... well, she isn't a statesman. She is a simplistic and opportunistic politician of her time and place, victorious at the polls by the default "R" option but vulnerable for the history books.
She'll tell you straight away that she's a gun-packer and a God-fearer and that if those things get her beat, then she'll just have to get beat.
She says the Affordable Care Act is "overreach," which is a handy negative connotation to attach to trying to help people. It tests better in focus groups than "Democrats just care more than Republicans are willing to pay for poor people and disabled people and sick people."
It's an easy issue for me because "overreach" is humaneness as far as I'm concerned. But I understand that resistance to Obamacare can carry its own compassion.
There was the health insurance agent who was telling me that it hurts him to go every year to Arkansas companies, their owners and employees, to report that premiums on their company plan will go up several percentage points, straining working-class paychecks and probably costing jobs. He said he understands that the seriously diseased require their own protections, but he wonders whether there isn't some way to separate those needs.
I say that there indeed is such a way. First, you simply must make the insurance pools universal by mandating that everyone gets health insurance and setting a tax penalty high enough to compel universal enrollment. Then you keep pre-existing conditions in the main insurance pool for equity and human decency. But the federal government establishes a high-risk fund to cover the actuarial, and expensive, gaps.
I'm trying without success to think of some better purpose for my taxes than bailing out a cancer patient while holding down premiums for the working class and protecting jobs.
There also is the obvious solution of Medicare for all. But there is such vigorous resistance that moving in that direction will require that Republicans destroy the Affordable Care Act--as they're assuredly trying--and put nothing much in its place, inevitably creating desperation.
So, on Friday, the lawsuit in Texas against the ACA by right-wing Republican attorneys general that Rutledge attached us to ... well, it scored a first-quarter touchdown. A federal judge agreed that the individual mandate is unconstitutional since the Republican Congress zeroed out the tax penalties for not complying.
Chief Justice John Roberts, in saving the ACA years ago, reasoned that the mandate's penalties were legal because they amounted to taxes, and taxes are plainly within Congress' authority.
The Texas judge said that, absent the taxes, the individual mandate had no legal basis on its own. He went so far as to say the whole law had to be thrown out.
He would put out of business the federal mandate for pre-existing conditions and the federal money for Medicaid expansion that has insured a quarter-million poor Arkansans, kept the state budget flush, kept rural hospitals open and, by fattening the pool, held all our premiums below where they've soared in many states.
Rutledge is proud of herself for having piggybacked that. She says Congress can now design a better and less-costly set of services, such as by referring pre-existing coverages to supposedly virtuous "state flexibility."
Let me tell you what happens when you give "flexibility" to the meaner states like Arkansas. They start throwing poor people off Medicaid for not clicking a computer they don't own.
Fortunately, the Texas judge issued no injunction, meaning his ruling will have no effect for a couple of years or more while it wends its way back to Chief Justice Roberts, the swing vote. The chief justice may or may not save either the individual mandate or the rest of the law without it.
If he doesn't, we'll probably be on our way to a requisite period of human desperation eroding the resistance to Medicare for all.
The Affordable Care Act needs revision and fixing, not full sacrifice on the altar of the default "R."
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/18/2018