re: NWA Tea Party POS Sen. Bart Hester

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* Medical care for the aged, disabled, and the blind, covering 142,077 people. This includes the elderly in nursing homes and people with severe disabilities. 

* ARKids, providing coverage for more than 400,000 low-income kids. 

* Home and community-based services for 11,000 elderly people and people with severe physical disabilities. 

* Medical services for nearly 5,000 foster children (the Division of Children and Family Services is not part of the relevant Medical Services appropriation, but medical care for many foster children is funded via the Medicaid budget). 

* TEFRA, a Medicaid program that provides care to disabled children in their homes. Hester's game of chicken threatens funding to help families with children with severe health challenges such as cerebral palsy and wheelchair-bound children. (I am waiting on DHS to provide a precise number of families impacted.)

* Funding to help more than 60,000 elderly Medicare beneficiaries with care and costs not covered by Medicare. 

* Coverage for thousands of extremely poor parents of dependent children. 

* Coverage for more than 10,000 low-income pregnant women who are not otherwise covered by the private option. 

* Closure of the 250-bed Arkansas Health Center, a public nursing home that takes patients that few or no other nursing homes will take, such as patients on a ventilator and patients with severe cognitive dysfunction. 

* State hospitals that provide care for civilly committed patients having acute and severe behavioral health crises would lose 30 beds. 

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