Our View

Our View

Number of uninsured dropping is a good news/bad news situation

We suppose the fact that the percentage of Arkansans who lack health insurance continues to drop below the national rate should be all the reason in the world to celebrate, and if it weren’t for the fact that this is due to the enormous number of people getting it for free on the taxpayers’ dime, there just might be justification for jubilance.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, which some West Memphis politicians don’t trust, this is the first time since 2008 we’ve been below the national rate. We’re told the number of uninsured Arkansans fell by almost 46,000, to 231,775, in 2016.

Nationwide, the number of Arkansans who reported they lacked overage fell by 8 percent, to 27.3 million, with the percentage of Americans who were uninsured dropping from 9.4 percent to 8.6 percent.

Now then, let’s remember when our brilliant politicians in Washington shoved Obamacare down our throats and it was Obama attempted to make health care mandatory for everyone. And, anyone who refused to play the game by his rules would be punished in the form of having income taxes refunds withheld.

Well, as we all know now that was a total farce. We were lied to then by Obama saying health cost premiums would be less than every before, we could keep our physicians and we’d all be taken care of thanks to his brilliant liberal and socialistic health care scam.

Compared with other states, Arkansas ranked 25th in the percentage of people who had coverage last year, compared to 30th place in 2015. You can certainly bet the bureaucrats overseeing this socialistic health care endeavor are rejoycing so many Arkansans are enrolling in Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s Arkansas Wroks program which provides free or subsidized health care to over 250,000 people.

The problem with this great “improvement” is that with all these people with incomes of up to 138 percent of the poverty level signing up for this government subsidy is the rising costs.

To address that issue, Hutchinson wants the federal government’s permission to move off bout 60,000 people off the free health care subsidy by limiting eligibility to those with incomes below the poverty level.

Most of those affected are expected to then qualify for federal tax subsidies to buy private coverage on the state’s health insurance exchange.

Naturally, the biggest benefactors of this government subsidy are those quarter of a million Arkansans but also benefiting greatly from this socialized health care are the hospital. By having these “poor” people having the government pay the cost of care hospitals have been able to sharly reduce the amount of unreimbursed care they provide to the uninsured.

The new concern for these hospitals is that if these 60,000 Arkansans being kicked on the free health care subsidy don’t sign up for federal tax subsidies to buy private coverage the number of uninsured needing emergency or in-house hospital care will create a serious financial crisis that may result in some hospitals to go out of business.

With all this said all this so-called “good news” about the percentage of ARkansans who lack health insurance dropping isn’t all that good when taking into considerating all the facts.