Arkansas Senators Lincoln & Pryor Turn Another Deaf Ear to the Voice of Arkansans

Arkansas AFP - Little Rock, AR – This Christmas Eve, while most Arkansas families are getting ready for the holidays with their children, Senator Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor voted this morning to saddle the next generation of Arkansans with massive debt to pay for their out of control government spending.”

“Over the last week the corruption, secrecy, and political payoffs that Arkansans have watched in the U.S. Senate surrounding the health care debate, shows that health care reform is about ramming a bill through instead of about getting it done right,” stated Teresa Crossland-Oelke, Arkansas State Director for Americans for Prosperity. “Even today, new information from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) makes it clear that this bill is not deficit neutral as our Arkansas Senators allege.”

Oelke, referring to the CBO letter release December 23 stating, “Unified budget accounting shows that the majority of the HI trust fund savings would be used to pay for other spending under the PPACA and would not enhance the ability of the government to redeem the bonds credited to the trust fund to pay for future Medicare benefits. To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings as both improving the government’s ability to pay future Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government’s fiscal position.”

Oelke commented, “Basically our Senators are trying to spend the same money in two columns. This information from the CBO is the type of information that is important to wait on, instead of rushing changes through with just 40 hours consideration to meet an arbitrary deadline.”

In addition, Senator John Cornyn of Texas has pointed out that this health care bill has an unfunded Medicare mandate of $230 million for Arkansas . “With a balanced budget amendment in our constitution, the Arkansas budget cannot afford this unfunded mandate with out cuts to infrastructure, education, or public safety and/or tax increases,” said Oelke.

“Senator Lincoln and Senator Pryor ignored the common sense voice of the people they represent. Instead of taking this great opportunity to make changes such as tort reform, increasing competition for insurance companies across state lines in a bi-partisan manner, they played pork barrel, partisan politics and voted with their extreme party leadership instead of the people they represent. They took this great opportunity and used it to spend every opportunity our children and grandchildren have,” concluded Oelke.

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