By Rob Moritz
Arkansas News Bureau

LITTLE ROCK — Health care reform legislation before Congress would hurt Arkansas, Republican gubernatorial candidate Jim Keet said today, adding that as governor he would ask the Legislature to reject any federal health insurance mandates.

Keet challenged Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat, to take a stand on the legislation that could come to a vote as early as this week.

“Without question this measure will have damaging effects on our Arkansas economy, but most importantly, it will have the unintended consequence of raising both unemployment and the number of uninsured simultaneously in the state,” Keet said during a news conference at the state Capitol.

Before Keet’s appearance, Beebe said he has not seen the completed bill but that he is concerned about what it would cost the state.

“My second concern is, and always has been, what are they doing with the basic underlying structural issue of cost containment?”

But the governor said he did not want to get into a daily tit-for-tat on issues raised by his Republican opponent.

“I’m not responding to daily challenges,” Beebe said. “I’m trying to do a job here.”

A decisive vote on the health care legislation is expected within the next few days.

Today, the House Budget Committee voted to advance a draft “reconciliation” bill toward a floor vote later this week while Democratic leaders worked to gather enough votes to push the bill through the House, where Democrats hope to use the measure to make budget-related changes to legislation that passed the Senate last year.

Those changes would go to the Senate for a vote under the process known as reconciliation, which requires a simple majority rather than 60 votes to avoid a Republican filibuster.

Keet contended today that the proposal would raise average individual health insurance premiums but $2,100, and that the penalty for employers who do not participate would range from $750 to $2,000.

Also, the proposal would increase federal spending by $959 billion over 10 years, he said.

Beebe said federal health reform was a legitimate issue in the governor’s race.

“I’ve talked for a long time about various bills that we’ve seen reported and that we’ve read prior to their changes and prior to their potential changes, and what effect does that have on the state budget, particularly the state Medicaid budget,” Beebe said. “That’s obviously a concern, that should be a concern, for anybody that wants to be governor or is governor.”

The governor said he has been talking for about a year about the “entire systemic issue of changing the paradigm on how we pay for health care.”

Beebe said that as a former chairman of a hospital board, he had experienced the uncompensated care, cost-shifting and what he called the “hidden tax” caused by them.

“That is something that any state official should be concerned about, including the governor,” he said.

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Reporter John Lyon contributed to this report.