There is a certain rhythm to life in Arkansas that you can only truly understand if you've spent a balmy July evening sitting on a porch, watching fireflies dance in the yard. It's a place--rural Arkansas at least--where we still look each other in the eye, wave at passing trucks on dirt roads, and believe down in our bones that we are responsible for taking care of one another.

Like one of my granny's quilts, we are stitched together by shared history, faith, and a deep-seated neighborliness that, in times of crisis like my family recently experienced, rises above the noise of politics. On my ranch in Ozark, when the chips are down, you realize how much we rely on the simple, sometimes unspoken agreements of community to survive.

I see this concept disregarded, and further, threatened, nearly constantly, by the politicians charged to serve us. The total abortion ban that endangers our mothers and daughters is an example. Another, the one I know the most about and have fought the hardest, is LEARNS, designed by powerful private interests far beyond Arkansas to dismantle our public school system. And now we are facing another huge blow, one that will affect all the people who sit around our kitchen tables from northwest Arkansas to the Delta.

We are facing yet another moment that tests the fabric of who we say we are. News recently broke that the federal government rejected Arkansas' request to renew our unique Medicaid expansion program--the first in the nation of its kind, the one we currently call ARHOME.

For readers like I was, who may not understand what the program does, essentially the state pays 10% of the health........

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