Sen. Bryan King On Healthcare: The Real Question Is ‘Who Should Get Welfare?’

Sen. Bryan King, R-Green Forest, has been a staunch opponent of Arkansas’ private option program since its inception.

The private option is the state program that uses Medicaid dollars to purchase health insurance for lower-income Arkansans. It originated in the 2013 General Assembly as a state response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling regarding the Affordable Care Act, also referred to as Obamacare.

The state secured a waiver from federal officials to allow Arkansas’ share of Medicaid dollars to be diverted to a private health insurance market for those making between 100% and 138% of the federal poverty level (FPL).

The feds have paid 100% of the cost of the Medicaid expansion program, but the state was scheduled to pick up a portion of the expenses incrementally beginning in 2017.

Currently, a legislative task force is looking to end the private option and find larger health insurance solutions for Arkansans. Sen. King visited with Talk Business & Politics reporter Steve Brawner for a conversation.

TB&P: Your opposition to the private option. Is that just an Obama thing?

Sen. Bryan King: No, it’s a cost issue. Do you want me to show you? I wrote an op-ed last fall that showed we never could afford this. If you looked at the growth rates of Arkansas’ economy … we were going to have to have 4% or 5% growth to keep up and maintain once this money kicks in, you know the cost-share part.

So there was never any realistic projections that said that we could ever pay for the private option and pay for schools, which we know are going to cost more. You know, prisons are going to cost more. You know, about every facet of state government is going to cost more.

So, you look at the growth of our revenue, the amount of money we get in from the taxpayers. You know, they do the projections. There was no way we can pay for it. I’d be more than happy to send you the op-ed I wrote and send you the actual figures that I got from the Bureau [of Legislative Research].

TB&P: I want to see them.

King: Absolutely. So [Gov.] Beebe and the architects [of the private option] sold us a plan that we never could realistically pay for.

TB&P: For some perspective, where do you get your insurance?

King: When I was a kid through high school when I was on my dad’s insurance, as soon as I went off that, I paid for my own health insurance.

When I got elected and became a state employee, I had the opportunity to participate in that, and I have. It’s not (something) that I have hidden from the taxpayers. I think some legislators don’t like to answer that question. I’ve always been the type that’s been honest and straightforward and been on the state employee health insurance program, and when I’m not elected anymore, I’ll go back to paying my own insurance. And we pay a portion, and the state contributes just like every other state worker does. …

I don’t understand how this is part of the story about hundreds of millions of dollars. I think it’s a separate story.

TB&P: Right now, there are a quarter million in Arkansas who have insurance most of whom assumedly did not have it before. Why did the previous system not cover these people?

King: These people are able-bodied working age adults, so the real question is, is who should get welfare, basically? I think Medicaid should be designed for children, the disabled and the elderly.

So this whole population is able-bodied, working age adults. The same people that can go in my district, that can go work in a plant and get health insurance, where now we’re seeing where people don’t want to go to work because they by not working can get better insurance than the regular person out here.

I mean right now everybody with insurance is paying more for less coverage. At the same time, we’re signing up able-bodied working age adults with 100% coverage – the best coverage – better coverage than what people out there working on the line at a plant get. That’s the facts. …

So, the path of the private option of looking at able-bodied working age adults sets up this system that we have that disincentivizes people to work. So you look at this system, as you said, what do you do about getting these people coverage? They’re going to have to find coverage the same way everybody else does.

TB&P: What do you hope is the replacement for this?

King: What I say the replacement is, is to look at our state budget as a whole. As I mentioned earlier, I’ll show you the facts and figures. You cannot add – it’s simple math – you cannot add this extra cost to the state budget and not affect everything else.

So what you have to do is the same thing you do with your budget, or a business does, and say how much am I going to have to spend on K-12 education, because you can sit here and look at the private option. Anybody that dumps a billion dollars into something is going to have some good results. But the overall financial health of our state depends a lot on how we budget.

Once again, you’re going to have to figure out how much you budget for schools, how much you budget for prisons and then you’re going to have to do healthcare. And then when you do, you figure out an amount that you can spend on healthcare and then you do your policy based on what you can afford.

What’s going on now – and what happened with the private option – was they said we’ve got this free money, let’s just take it, and to hell with the budget in a few years, I’m not going to worry about it, and we’ll worry about that when it comes to it. Well, we’re starting to come to it. …

Talk Business ran a story here awhile back about how our economy is growing slower. I’ll pull it up. You can see where, look at our farm income. Crop prices again are going to have another tough year. Natural gas drilling is not booming like it was.

So you look at two facets, stable things of the Arkansas economy, that were doing pretty well are (now) not. So what does that translate to? That means we’re going to possibly have at the best slower growth than what we ordinarily would. And you have to look at the whole budget. There’s no way to sit here and look at just the private option part without talking about the whole budget.