In case you missed it, the message at yesterday’s budget hearing on the state Medicaid program was simple:

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Arkansas can lay out an additional half-billion in state and federal dollars and still be forced to slash important services to 75,000 people. Or it can join the federal health care law’s expansion of Medicaid at no cost to the state for three years and expand help for hundreds of thousands of Arkansan living without a health safety net and, in the process, incurring immense unseen costs for us all. Not to mention dying.

Rational people would take the money. Many Republican legislators simply won’t. These include many legislators braying about forcing poor people to put “skin in the game” who are happy to get taxpayer-financed health insurance for themselves. And when this same crowd starts talking about waste and fraud, ask them for some figures on the relative cost of fraud by people seeking medical services against fraud by pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, doctors, insurance companies and others getting rich off the system. The problem isn’t a sick old lady seeing a doctor too often. Nor is it lack of co-pays.

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Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families has produced a good explainer and graphic material on what the legislature faces. It outlines the dimension of a problem that extends far beyond the presumed moochers to working people who serve them:

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