OPINION
The pope’s man from 2nd District
F
rench Hill, the Republican banker Francis? Good just elected to Congress from the question. 2nd District, is no Vic Snyder. We For examknew that, but an article in the latest ple, Hill wouldn’t Arkansas Catholic, news organ of the commit to supDiocese of Little Rock, indicates that he’s port the DREAM MAX a conservative outlier in his own church. Act, which helps BRANTLEY Hill is described as the first Catholic immigrants who maxbrantley@arktimes.com elected to represent the 2nd District. came to America He’s not the first Catholic to represent as children. Arkansas Bishop Anthony Little Rock. That was William Leake Taylor supports the DREAM Act. PasTerry, who served from 1891-1901 when sionately. Taylor has also preached about Little Rock was in the 4th District. Hill economic justice, as has Pope Francis. and his wife, the article noted, organized Hill opposes a minimum wage. a “mass of Thanksgiving” at Christ the Hill shares some ground with church King Catholic Church the day after the leaders. Hill supports sending public tax election. His campaign sent the invita- dollars to private schools in the form of tions. vouchers. He opposes the mandated covHill wasn’t elected by Little Rock. Pat erage of contraceptives in health insurHays carried Pulaski County and much ance on religious grounds, though he of Little Rock easily, including much claims to favor “more personal choice” of the environs of the Country Club of in health care. His idea of choice just Little Rock, where Hill golfs. doesn’t happen to include contracepHill’s politics are better attuned to out- tives or abortion. On same-sex marlying counties, such as White, Faulkner riage, Hill gave a disturbing response: and Saline, which gave the patrician mil- “Hill said he thinks the states should be lionaire big margins. Attuned to Pope able to define what ‘consenting adult
GOP’s new Obamacare attack
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t was inevitable. The long crusade against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has pivoted from a battle against socialism to a populist war against big business: The program known as Obamacare is now supposed to be merely a feed trough for the captains of industry, not a government program to force health care on the undeserving poor. Ronald Reagan’s think tank, the Heritage Foundation, which actually designed the blueprint for the health care law known as Obamacare, issued a report in August claiming that the law reduced competition in the insurance and health care industries and encouraged monopolies, although the results in 2014 suggest just the opposite. Insurance companies rushed to get into the law’s exchanges in the second year of their operation and compete to sell policies to individuals and small employers. California’s Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank that usually fortifies Republican policy on social and economic questions, chimed in that, thanks to Obamacare, the insurance industry and sinful government had developed a “symbiotic relationship, nurtured by tens of billions of dollars that flow from the federal Treasury to insurers
each year.” There is an element of truth in the charge (more about that in a minute), although Cato typically ERNEST ignores the purpose DUMAS and the biggest result of the law — the extension of health care and protections for tens of millions of Americans. The New York Times this week reported that the insurance industry, which had joined Republicans in fighting the president and Congress over the law for four years, in alliance with Obama now helps protect the law from its enemies, the Republican Party. The change in battle strategies has filtered down to the squad level. J. French Hill, the millionaire banker and investor who is the new congressman-elect from Arkansas’s 2nd District, said in a glowing profile last week in his Catholic diocesan newspaper that the Affordable Care Act “is a $2 trillion money machine that benefits hospitals and drug companies and hurts doctors and patients.” Who knew that President Obama was not a socialist, but a friend of the big
relationships’ are.” Really? Define consenting relationships? Make a crime of unwed sex, say? Hill, who spoke warmly about how Pope Francis has “humanized” the papacy, seemed less than humane in remarks about the federal Affordable Care Act. He described it as “a $2 trillion money machine that benefits hospitals and drug companies and hurts doctors and patients.” He also lauded ARKids. How insurance coverage hurts families and doctors Hill didn’t explain. Nor did he explain what would become of sick people, who couldn’t be insured without the mandate that all participate in health insurance, healthy and unhealthy. He also didn’t explain how ending Obamacare — with it the loss of coverage for a quarter-of-a-million Arkansans, including many children — would be humane. Hill’s remarks were noted by Stephanie Spencer, a registered nurse and Catholic herself. She wrote a letter to the Catholic newspaper and sent me a copy. She said Arkansas’s private option version of Obamacare had helped 250,000 and saved hospitals, including Catholic institutions, from eating the rising cost of uninsured care. The result is comprehensive care rather than stop-
gap emergency room treatment for real people. She wrote about Hill’s “money machine”: “... our society does not generally construe an organization simply being paid for services rendered to be a giveaway. Since the implementation of the private option in Arkansas, hospitals have had a 56 percent decrease in uncompensated care costs. Hence, Arkansas’s private option is helping to keep hospitals, often the primary economic force in rural communities, open and providing jobs and needed health care for Arkansans.” Spencer did a little preaching, too, saying, “As Catholics, we have an obligation to live the ENTIRETY of Christ’s gospel, without a sole focus on abortion and gay marriage in political deliberations.” She also quoted the pope: “I beg the Lord to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor! It is vital that government leaders and financial leaders take heed and broaden their horizons, working to ensure that all citizens have dignified work, education and healthcare.” I don’t think it a stretch to say the pope doesn’t sound like someone who’d repeal Obamacare.
corporations that seemed to be dedicated to his and his party’s defeat? But Hill would be hard-pressed to prove his facts. The big pharmaceutical companies benefited hugely not from the Obama insurance reform of 2010, but from the Medicare drug law, passed by the Republican Congress and signed by President Bush in 2003 and implemented in 2006. By 2016 it will cost the government $550 billion, most of it flowing into the coffers of Big Pharma. The “money machine” that Hill says benefits the hospitals, like those run by Catholic institutions, is the money from insurers that pays for the care of the working poor, which until this year hospitals wrote off as charity and passed on to paying patients through higher bed fees. Only a few months ago the evil of Obamacare was supposed to be that it was taking taxes paid by the rich and maybe even by you and paying hospitals and doctors for treating those who could not afford insurance. The strategy for killing the Affordable Care Act had to change to deal with realities. The horrors of Obamacare that were advertised so universally in 2009 and 2010 as the law was being written never materialized. The elderly didn’t see their Medicare benefits reduced but rather improved. Government didn’t take over
health care. People still see the doctor of their choice, and they jointly decide on treatment. No Republican in Congress — wait, maybe Tom Cotton — really thinks they should just repeal Obamacare. So with the U. S. Supreme Court taking another shot at the law, owing to a clumsily worded section about the state exchanges, you need to give the justices some cover for killing it. They would be stopping a giant giveaway to greedy insurance and drug companies and hospitals. The Obama-insurance alliance is ironic. It was America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the big lobby for the insurance industry, aided by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that saturated Arkansas media in 2009 and 2010 with scary ads about how the plan would wipe out their insurance or subject them to government czars when they got sick. Massive support for universal health insurance in Arkansas reversed in six months. “Don’t let the government take my Medicare,” people cried at town hall meetings on Obamacare. The insurance companies then were fighting the so-called “public option,” the provision in the House bill that authorized the government to offer plans to compete with insurance company plans. But it was the Senate bill, which offered no government option, that became law. The companies also CONTINUED ON PAGE 32 www.arktimes.com
NOVEMBER 20, 2014
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