The number grows of people who’ll be out of luck come the day Mrs. Dr. Missy Irvin and her gang of eight defeat reauthorization of the Private Option version of Obamacare.
An update from the state on enrollment numbers:
As of 2/1/14:
149,157 – Total number of private option applicants from state and federal levels.*
Of those, 102,173 have been determined eligible for the private option so far.
Of those determined eligible for the private option, 83,032 have completed the enrollment process (as of 2/3/14). An additional 9,525 have been determined to be better served by traditional Medicaid for a total of 92,557 people who will now have coverage.
* This number includes 137,363 private option applicants through the State and 11,794 private option applicants received from the federally facilitated marketplace who have been determined eligible and their data has been processed by the state.
Above: Meet a small business owner who’s happy about the private option that the Tea Party wants to take away. From Jonesboro, where a determined teabagger opponent to the private option just won a special Senate election. Speaking of Jonesboro: Though the once-proud family owned Sun is now a chain paper with a right-winger for a boss, some reasonable words still slip into the newspaper now and then. Waylon Harris, managing editor, wrote a column praising efforts by House Speaker Davy Carter and others to keep the expanded insurance program alive. In praising Carter, Harris observed:
It’s difficult to go against the grain when the few who scream the loudest are the ones most heard.
These are the same folks who took offense earlier this year to Americans being dropped from their privately acquired insurance policies because those policies didn’t meet standards laid out by the Affordable Care Act, despite President Barack Obama’s infamous statements that Americans who liked their health plans could keep those plans.
Will those politicians cry foul when more than 100,000 working poor Arkansans are kicked to the curb without medical coverage, this time by the actions of those same politicians?
Hardly. Instead, it will lead to a victory march highlighted by political speeches of how a minority of lawmakers prevented Obamacare from providing coverage to a bunch of folks who should have taken more personal responsibility to dig themselves from the trenches of poverty.