Category Archives: State government

Reforming health care reform

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

During the next two years, the most important number in Arkansas health care may be 1332.

That’s a section of the Affordable Care Act, the one that created Obamacare, that, starting in 2017, may allow Arkansas significant flexibility in implementing the law – potentially even letting it nullify some of its more controversial elements, including the mandate that individuals buy health insurance. Or maybe not.

Legislators serving on two panels these past two weeks heard testimony regarding Section 1332. Cheryl Smith Gardner is directing the state’s changeover from a federal exchange to a state exchange, which is where small businesses and individuals buy insurance. She once was a researcher for the conservative Heritage Foundation. Dr. Lanhee Chan is a Stanford University research fellow who was the chief health advisor for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.

In other words, these are not left-wingers, and both of them indicated Section 1332 offers the potential for major state-based reforms to the Affordable Care Act.

In a nutshell, here’s how it would work. Beginning Jan. 1, 2017, states can receive waivers from the federal government for large sections of the law provided their reforms meet four requirements. A waiver says the law does not apply in a particular situation.

First, health plans – whether provided by insurance companies or the state – must provide coverage that is at least as comprehensive as would be provided otherwise. What does that mean? It’s not clear, but it could mean that plans in Arkansas could have a heavier focus in some areas and a lighter one in others than they currently have.

The other requirements are that out-of-pocket expenses for individuals must be no higher than they are now; coverage must be provided to a comparable number of people as otherwise would be provided; and the changes must not increase the federal budget deficit over a 10-year period.

The section is so open-ended that it appears states can propose almost anything – although one thing they can’t change is the requirement that insurance companies offer coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions. If a state can figure out a way to cover as many people without the individual and employer mandates, it can propose it. Arkansas might be able to move large parts of its population from Medicaid, which is strictly government health care, to the so-called private option, which is more flexible because it’s government-funded health care through private insurance companies. Chan said it might be possible to collectively make changes to all federal health care programs within a state’s boundaries, including Medicare, where states’ roles now are limited.

“My own view is that 1332 has the potential to be a significant step forward for those seeking market-based health care reform,” he told the Health Reform Legislative Task Force May 28. “The challenge, of course, as with any waiver is that the negotiation process has two parties. It has the state, and it has the presidential administration.”

There’s the catch: The waivers have to be approved by the secretary of Health and Human Services and the secretary of the Treasury, which includes the IRS. The skeptical lady sitting beside me was doubtful those officials will approve anything that’s not more generous to beneficiaries than Obamacare already is. Sen. Terry Rice, R-Waldron, wondered if the administration might fail to hold up its end of the bargain if a waiver were approved. When Chan said that would be “unprecedented,” Rice replied, “I appreciate that thought, but I’m one that (feels) like we’ve seen some unprecedented things.”

On the plus side, the Obama administration has proven itself willing to grant health care-related waivers. The private option, in fact, exists because of a waiver. The administration knows that the Affordable Care Act is widely distrusted in red states like Arkansas, so it has an incentive to be flexible. Judging by the questions legislators asked, most seem to be keeping an open mind. Chan’s job in 2012 was to help defeat Obama, and he seems cautiously optimistic about the possibilities.

No state has yet submitted a waiver request, and Arkansas is nowhere near doing so. In fact, most legislators only now are learning much about it. It could create a lot of work that leads nowhere and is a huge disappointment. Or it could let states creatively reform health care reform. We won’t know which will be the case until 2017 is much closer. Until then, remember the number 1332.

With 600 jobs at stake, reality beats ideology

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

This week, state legislators, many of them elected promising to fight big government, voted for a lot of it, coming and going. They did so because today’s realities trump their political ideologies.

The legislators voted in special session for an $87 million bond package, paid for by Arkansas taxpayers, to help Lockheed Martin win a federal government contract to build 55,000 Joint Light Tactical Vehicles near Camden. In other words, state taxpayers will go into debt so the federal government can spend money.

This is corporate welfare at its most naked. Almost all of the package, $83 million, is going directly to a global company with $45.6 billion in sales last year, dwarfing Arkansas’ state budget. The practice is so ingrained that, during a press conference on the Capitol steps Tuesday, when asked why taxpayers should give his company money, a Lockheed representative simply turned and walked away from the podium, letting Gov. Asa Hutchinson answer the question.

All of this should be contrary to somebody’s political ideology, and yet of course legislators said yes, because in this case, reality is far more important. And the reality is that this project is expected to create at least 600 jobs and perhaps far more in south Arkansas, which badly needs them.

This would be the auto plant Arkansas has long wanted, but it’s even better because the customer is almost guaranteed to buy the plant’s products. Moreover, in addition to Uncle Sam’s 55,000-vehicle order, foreign governments will come shopping. Suppliers would locate close to the JLTV factory, creating more jobs. The presence of the JLTV facility would increase the area’s defense presence; already, hardware such as the Patriot missile is produced there. And if the state does this auto plant right, maybe civilian auto manufacturers could be persuaded to locate here as well. These things tend to snowball.

Those are realities. Here’s another one: Legislators knew the next potential large employer might want to locate in their district. They’d better play ball with south Arkansas lawmakers, because someday they may need their votes.

Finally, there’s this reality. Lockheed Martin is competing against two strong companies, Oshkosh and AM General, maker of the Humvee. The Pentagon has already decided that these 55,000 vehicles will be built somewhere, so Arkansas taxpayers will pay for them regardless. If 600 jobs are to be created, it might as well be in Camden.

Human beings need foundational beliefs lest we twist in the wind. For lawmakers, those foundational beliefs might include – actually, I hope they include – an aversion to big government and corporate welfare.

But there’s a difference between foundational beliefs, which allow room for difficult moral judgments and common sense, and rigid political ideology, which runs everything through a filter and requires new facts to conform to prior beliefs, or to be ignored.

Outside of this session, legislators and others are talking about difficult issues that won’t be settled in three days: how Arkansas’ health care system should look; how it should fund highways; how it should reform its prison system; what it should do about the Common Core.

If lawmakers are willing to vote for the JLTV package because it’s better to do so than not, then let’s hope they are willing to accept some other realities as well, and then work within them. Ideologically, they may hate the private option, but the reality is that it now provides health insurance for a quarter million Arkansans who mostly wouldn’t have it otherwise, so if they want it to go away, they should replace it with a better idea. The reality is that highways are badly underfunded, so if lawmakers’ ideology says that taxes are bad but roads are good, they need to offer creative ideas that are consistent with their foundational beliefs but not hamstrung by rigid ideologies.

If it were up to me, the federal government would buy fewer than 55,000 JLTVs. We’re going to pass part of the cost to our kids, and that’s not right. But if they’re going to be built, I hope they’re built in Camden by my fellow Arkansans. All things being equal, I think you take care of your own first.

It’s a foundational belief.

The keys for Johnny Key: leading, mending

Johnny Key speaks after Gov. Asa Hutchinson announces him as his choice as education commissioner.

Johnny Key speaks after Gov. Asa Hutchinson announces him as his choice as education commissioner.

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

I’m not the first person to point out that two of the most important people in Arkansas education these days are not educators. Not surprisingly, some educators are not happy about this.

Those two would be former Sen. Johnny Key, the state’s new education commissioner, and Baker Kurrus, the new Little Rock School District superintendent, who was appointed by Key.

Until this past legislative session, Key legally could not have served in his current post. Under previous state law, the state’s education commissioner was required to have been an educator for 10 years with five years’ experience as an administrator. Key has owned a day care but has not worked in education.

Previously, he was chairman of the Senate Education Committee and was the leading legislator regarding education policy. In that role, the Republican won friends and respect because of his cooperative, conciliatory, consensus-building style. You might not agree with him, but he’s fair.

He’s also perhaps the best person to be education commissioner, despite his lack of qualifications.

For the past decade, Arkansas education has been marked by consensus thanks to a common enemy – the fear of returning to court. The state spent many years under the thumb of the Lake View case because the Arkansas Constitution requires a “general, suitable and efficient system of free public schools,” which the courts redefined as “adequate” and “equitable.” To get the state out of court, and keep it out, legislators poured money into schools and then regularly gave them a cost of living raise, at the expense of all other state priorities. When other states were cutting school funding, Arkansas was increasing it.

But thanks to time and term limits, Lake View is a fading memory, and the ties that bound everyone together are fraying. A real divide exists now at the Capitol among education reformers, including some Republican legislators, and the education establishment. If anybody can bring those two sides together, it’s Key, the former Republican legislator known for fairness.

Still, the idea that a non-educator would be in charge of education policy is understandably hard for some educators to accept. He’s never been in the trenches with them. He’s never tried to teach geometry to a struggling student, or administer a standardized test, or deal firsthand with the laws he helped pass. My wife the other day said the president of the United States ought to have served in the military, of which he or she serves as commander-in-chief. It’s the same principle.

Key has some fences to mend across the state, especially after one of his first major acts was to appoint Kurrus as superintendent of the Little Rock School District. As education commissioner, Key effectively is a one-man school board for every district under state control, and that includes the state’s largest.

Like Key, Kurrus has crafted education policy but isn’t an educator. A well-respected attorney and businessman, he served 12 years on the Little Rock School Board and has been heading a committee studying the district’s finances. If Key is best described as “conciliatory and cooperative,” Kurrus could be described as “thoroughly competent,” and the district could use a lot of that right now.

But he’s not a competent educator, or at least, not an experienced one. The appointment of a legislator to lead education – that was tough for some to swallow. When that legislator named an attorney and businessman to lead Little Rock’s schools – well, then it became kind of a one-two punch.

Outsiders can bring a needed fresh perspective, and there are many walks of life where an organization’s leader is not necessarily an expert in that organization’s primary mission. It works well when those leaders understand their role and limitations and let the experts do their jobs. When I asked Key about his lack of experience, he cited the example of the hospital CEO who is not a doctor. Would any patient care? Of course not.

Is that a good analogy? Mostly, although in many hospitals, the doctors are the stars with the ultimate power, and the CEO, no matter how well paid, plays a support role. Teachers don’t quite have that kind of sway. The most important single person in Arkansas public education is now Johnny Key. The most important single person in Little Rock public education is now Baker Kurrus, and the person to whom he answers is Key.

This can work as long as they know their roles, let the experts do their jobs, and mend some fences.

Arkansas seeks to find its place in the nonstop campaign

CapitolBy Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced Tuesday that legislators will be returning to Little Rock for a special session May 26. The main reason will be to pass a bond issue to help Lockheed Martin compete for a contract to produce the military’s new Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, the replacement for the Humvee, in Camden.

Lockheed Martin is a global megacorporation with $45.6 billion in sales in 2014, so it will be interesting to see what Arkansas taxpayers will be asked to fund. But this is the way the game is played these days, so Arkansas must play it. At stake is the production of 55,000 vehicles – basically, the auto plant the state long has coveted – and that’s not counting what foreign militaries might order. About 600 jobs would be created in south Arkansas, which needs them.

Legislators also will consider ways of streamlining state government – Hutchinson hasn’t offered concrete proposals regarding how – and might consider moving Arkansas’ political primaries, or maybe just the presidential ones, to March 1. That’s the subject of the rest of this column.

Tired of ceding the early presidential nominating process to Iowa and New Hampshire and then being forgotten later, a group of Southern states are considering holding their primaries March 1 in what many are calling the “SEC primary.”

Arkansas voters don’t usually play much of a role in presidential politics. The state’s primary election occurs so late in the process that many candidates have dropped out by the time Arkansans vote, and the state is so small that the remaining candidates don’t make it a priority. Legislators considered the SEC primary in the recently completed regular session. The bill didn’t pass, but support didn’t die. Maybe it would make Arkansas more relevant. It might give Gov. Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign a boost, which his supporters would see as a plus.

These campaigns start early – Jan. 3 in Iowa in 2012, in fact. This year, the Iowa caucus will be Feb. 1, nine months before the general election, and the New Hampshire primary will be Feb. 9. And of course, candidates already have been campaigning for months.

Didn’t we just have an election? These days, elected officials are so focused on the next campaign that they can’t do the jobs voters chose them to do in the previous one. And that’s a problem with real-life consequences.

Case in point: The federal Highway Trust Fund is nearly empty, and the bill that funds it expires at the end of this month. A real, multi-year replacement is badly needed, but time is running out. We were in this same situation last year, but of course an election was coming up, so Congress passed a gimmicky, short-term fix that funded 10 months of construction with revenues borrowed from the next decade. Now those 10 months are over, and we’re right back where we were. Uncertain about what Congress is going to do this time, the state Highway Department has cancelled $282 million in construction projects this year. Last month, the American Trucking Associations’ chief lobbyist told Arkansas trucking executives that a bill must be written this year or else we’ll have to wait until the end of 2017 because presidential politics will get in the way.
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Contrast American democracy with Great Britain’s recently completed parliamentary election. Queen Elizabeth formally dissolved Parliament in late March at the request of Prime Minister David Cameron, the election was scheduled for May 7, the parties campaigned, and 66.1 percent of the electorate voted. The Conservatives won, and Cameron retained his post. It was over in six weeks.

Great Britain has its own problems, of course, and nobody here wants a monarch, but the United States clearly is not well served by a democratic government where few have time to govern anymore. According to the Declaration of Independence, the “pursuit of happiness” is one of the three inalienable rights that led to America’s founding. Are the nonstop campaigning and barrage of toxic negative advertising helping you pursue happiness?

We’ll know whether the primary election will be moved before the session begins because only issues where the outcome is reasonably certain will be included in the call. It will be predetermined behind closed doors, which is not very transparent but is efficient.

At least they’ll govern, and then voters can decide if they did the right thing. I hear there’s an election coming up.

Ex-con points way to closing prison’s revolving door

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Before this past legislative session, legislators were asked to consider building a $100 million prison, but nobody really wanted to do that. The state already housed more than 18,000 inmates, including a backlog of 2,500 in county jails, and a new prison would add only 1,000 beds. Forty-three percent of inmates released from prison return within three years, anyway. As soon as the new prison was finished, another would have to be built.

Other solutions are needed that change behavior, Gov. Asa Hutchinson said, so that prison becomes less of a revolving door. So he proposed, and legislators passed, a legislative package meant to provide a short-term fix, including renting space in Texas, and a more long-term effort that includes creating transitional re-entry centers where prisoners reintegrate into society – rather than just receiving the traditional $100 and a bus ticket back to the life that sent them to prison in the first place.

Hutchinson and legislators also created a criminal justice reform task force that is studying other options. Let’s hope its members talk to Jason Duncan.

Duncan, 33, does not look like an ex-con. He’s 6-5, handsome, and stands with a leader’s confident posture.

At age 18, he was a different person. At that point, he told me he decided “to seek whatever was pleasurable in the moment” and began a life that, a decade later, “found me completely addicted to drugs, a raging alcoholic and starting to develop quite a spectacular rap sheet.”

He was sitting in a concrete jail cell in North Carolina, a fugitive from Arkansas justice, when he opened a Bible out of boredom to Deuteronomy 28, read about curses resulting from disobedience, and saw himself. He decided to become a Christian, got out of jail, and immediately returned to his old life, which led him, finally, to an Arkansas correctional facility.

Duncan’s life began to change when he enrolled in a program offered through Arkansas Community Corrections where inmates are transported to Little Rock’s Arkansas Baptist College to participate in a program managed by Under Grace Ministries. The inmates attend classes in recovery, spiritual discipleship, entrepreneurial thinking and resource management.

The inmates stood out a little. They wore brown uniforms, which was OK because, Duncan said, “most of the students thought we worked for UPS.” Many were white, including Duncan, and they were attending class on a campus serving mostly African-American students that originally was built to educate former slaves.

The program gave Duncan the direction he needed. After leaving state custody, he remained at ABC for two semesters and then transferred to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he’s studying international business and marketing. He’s now the director of international student ministry at Fellowship Bible Church. He’s married and has a son from his previous life.

Last week, he spoke at a ceremony dedicating ABC’s Scott Ford Center for Entrepreneurship & Community Development, which will house an expanded version of the program that changed his life. So far, about 30 inmates have started the program. Next year, 100-120 will be involved.

I asked Duncan what services inmates need to return to society and stay out of prison. He said they need a spiritual foundation along with education and work training because many have never had a job and don’t really know what one is. They need help overcoming their addictions. Also, each one of them should transition to society in a halfway house, a “safe environment with accountability but also a mix of freedom.”

The recently passed legislative package will pay for 500 parolees to be involved in such transitional re-entry centers. The state each year releases 10,000 inmates back into society.

Duncan didn’t say it, but fewer people need to go to prison in the first place. There are two reasons 43 percent of inmates return to prison within three years. One is that they were messed up to begin with, and prison didn’t fix them. The other is that they had merely made mistakes to begin with, and then prison really messed them up.

Let’s hope policymakers wisely consider solutions from every angle – keeping people out of prison who shouldn’t be there, helping parolees avoid returning, and keeping those who should be in prison locked up. Let’s hope the state finds more partners like Under Grace Ministries and ABC. Halfway houses are a good start, but let’s not settle for halfway solutions.