How has the Affordable Care Act and health care reform directly affected consumers and access to health care? How does Medicaid expansion relate to the broader health reform effort? How has Arkansas’s Private Option affected the state’s health care system? What makes a premium assistance model appealing for health care Arkansas and other states?

These and other issues were discussed by panelists at the health care forum hosted by Arkansas Advocates for Children & Families on October 6. Our executive director Joan Alker delivered the keynote address, noting the changes in health coverage that we’ve observed at the national and state levels after the first full year of ACA implementation and Medicaid expansion

Before legislators, health care professionals, advocates, and policy experts, Joan expressed her “hope that over time—as the kind of acrimony about the affordable care act dies down, as we start to see its benefits, see what’s happening—that more and more states will look… at how to accept these federal funds in a way that closes the coverage gap for the most vulnerable folks among us.”

To paraphrase one participant, policies like the Private Option are complicated, but the results are not. Arkansas has been a national leader in lowering its uninsured rate. The forum made clear that the Private Option is working in Arkansas so, as our resident Arkansan Elisabeth Burak would say, why mess with success?