'This is absolutely not the way'

Congressional Republicans are tying themselves in knots, publicly infighting and sparking uproar over their party’s plan for enormous cuts to Medicaid and other programs that help hundreds of thousands of low-income or disabled people in Arkansas, including tens of thousands of children, afford to eat and get health care.

At a town hall at the Jones Center on Tuesday evening, the non-partisan Arkansas Advocates for Children & Families and other likeminded groups had a simple message for them: Just don’t make the cuts. And they called on everyone who agrees to repeat the message to their members of Congress.

“There’s so much at stake,” said Laura Kellams, Northwest Arkansas director for Arkansas Advocates. “I think the worst thing that we can do is lose hope that our voices matter.”

Here are the basics: The GOP’s leaders want to cut more than $600 billion from Medicaid, which helps cover health care for people with disabilities or below certain income levels. They want to cut almost $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka SNAP, aka food stamps. It’s all in the service of paying for certain income tax cuts and cutting federal spending overall, as our Rep. Steve Womack often says.

On the other hand, these programs and others like them turn out to support a lot of people, and the cuts would mean millions across the country would lose coverage and other support, especially in a poorer state like Arkansas.

Kellams said 160,000 in Womack’s district are on Medicaid, including 66,000 children and 31,000 seniors and disabled people, for example (and aren’t we all just a few years or one accident from becoming one or the other?). More than 60,000 people in the district also use SNAP in a typical year to buy healthy groceries they otherwise couldn’t afford.

Caitlyn Grimste of Fayetteville said at the town hall that she has been among the latter group, using SNAP to help feed her children after moving to the state more than a decade ago.

“I was able to create a life here” thanks to the program, she said. “I felt less alone, and I felt like I had something, and that kept me going.”

Less money to go around leaves Arkansas with a choice of whether to pick up the slack with its own money, including a likely tab of $50 million for SNAP alone, Kellams said. She won’t be holding her breath for that to happen.

“We don’t have a state that has $50 million lying around,” she said, noting that the state’s program is as strict and “stingy” as it can be, so “it’s not like we have a lot of fat to cut.” SNAP is also optional for a state to provide to its residents, she added, raising the prospect of losing SNAP entirely if it becomes too much trouble.

Medicaid also benefits from voluntary or “waiver” programs such as the Arkansas Support Network, which provides home- and community-based services (as opposed to hospital-based, for example) to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. And if cuts come down, “the first thing that we’re going to see is the shedding of voluntary programs,” Support Network CEO Syard Evans told the crowd.

“This is absolutely not the way,” she said of the proposed cuts.

What to do? Tell Congress not to cut the programs, not to push the bill to Arkansas, not to raise food costs and not to take away health coverage for tax cuts, Kellams said.

While there are different advocacy strategies for different situations, “this is a quantity time,” Evans said. “Just call and log it, send that email, send that post card.”

Here’s a couple of ways to reach Northwest Arkansas’ representatives in Congress:

• Rep. Steve Womack: Call 202-225-4301 or mail a message to 3333 S. Pinnacle Hills Parkway, Ste. 120, Rogers, AR 72758.

• Sen. John Boozman: Call 202-224-4843 or mail a post card to 213 W. Monroe, Ste. N, Lowell, AR 72745.

• Sen. Tom Cotton: Call 202-224-2353 or mail a message to 3333 S. Pinnacle Hills Parkway, Ste. 425, Rogers, AR 72758.