Not Good for Arkansas (Editorial)

The Affordable Care Act has never gained the popular support that Democrats hoped. But neither has it been as deeply unpopular as Republicans believed it would be when they spent years promising to repeal “Obamacare” and possibly to replace it.

And it has become somewhat more popular during the Trump administration, according to the monthly Kaiser Health Tracking Poll. As of last month, fully half of respondents said they had a generally favorable opinion of the ACA, while 40 percent had a generally unfavorable opinion.

With the Republicans who control Congress unwilling or unable to fulfill their promise, Republican attorneys general from around the country, including our own Leslie Rutledge, have made a stab at getting rid of the ACA altogether. Without replacement legislation — which would create its own complications — invalidating the ACA would do away with wildly popular parts, including the requirement that insurers sell coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

And, as the article on Page 1 explains, it would also do away with a part of Obamacare that has been optional for states: expanding Medicaid to the working poor. Most of the AGs who are suing to end Obamacare are from states that opted out of the Medicaid expansion, but Arkansas is not one of those. We call the program Arkansas Works, and we’ve used the federal dollars to buy private insurance for some 300,000 of our neighbors, creating more reliable cash-flow conditions for our rural hospitals.

If our AG and her cohorts are successful, the money for those Arkansans and those hospitals will cease to flow. And, of course, insurance companies will be free to turn away people with pre-existing conditions. We aren’t in a position to pass judgment on the legal argument, but the practical effect does not seem desirable for Arkansas absent the kind of congressional action that has been elusive.

Perhaps this is why Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s office didn’t comment.