Roby Brock: Welcome to this edition of the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal Report. I’m your host, Roby Brock. There has been a lot happening in the state’s business news this past week, from health-insurance premiums to the lithium summit to the cost of child care.
Reporter Steve Bronner, who reports for the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal and Talk Business & Politics, joins me on today’s Northwest Arkansas Business Journal Report.
Joining me now, Steve Bronner. He is a freelance journalist who does a lot of work for the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal and Talk Business & Politics. And he runs IndependentArkansas.com. How are you, Steve?
Steve Bronner: Good, Roby. How are you doing?
Brock: I’m good. You have covered some pretty big business stories this week. I want to start with your coverage of Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield CEO Curtis Barnett, who spoke to the Rotary Club of Little Rock. And he kind of gave a preview of what to expect on health-insurance premiums, which is a huge source of national conversation right now. What was kind of the summary of what Curtis Barnett had to say?
Bronner: Well, he just talked about the challenges that health insurers are facing right now. In fact, really the whole health-care system, you know, spending is going up and it’s going to keep going up as the population ages and as, you know, health-care access utilization increases. He said that, after, you know, in the past 18 to 24 months, there’s been a lot of utilization of health-care services. And he attributes that to, you know, people had deferred care during the pandemic. And so they let things go. They’ve come back into the system and it’s costly. And the people, those who do it, are probably a little bit sicker than they were. You know, other issues were, you know, that, you got the whole situation with the reason that the government is shut down is because the, the fight over whether or not we should have these enhanced premium tax credits extended, or done any way before we do the continuing resolution and, you know, that will, you know, if they’re not extended, we’ll see people drop out of the system. And when they do that, the risk pool will be less healthy.
Brock: So let’s move to another topic: child care in Arkansas. There is a report that came out, funded by United We. Also had some participation from the Walton Family Foundation, basically talking about how expensive child care is in Arkansas. This is not news to a lot of folks who either utilize child care or have been studying this issue. What are some of the root causes? What could be done, I guess, to improve the situation? The report did outline some, you know, opportunities for policy-makers to say we can change some of this.
Bronner: Yeah. It outlines six areas where they’d like to see some reforms. They said, you know, child care is not affordable enough and not available enough, especially in rural areas. So the one big area is the licensing process is too, too long, too duplicative, too hard. You sometimes have to go back and forth with state and local agencies asking the same things. And so just streamlining that process, they said that’d be the easiest thing to do. You know, financial barriers, they’d like to see more money, you know, made available to families. State-backed liability insurance programs would reduce the cost of premiums. That’s pretty difficult for these small providers to afford.
You know, workforce shortages. They’d like to see more training of workers. So, you know, dependents on — they want state funding. Federal funding has been cut for child care in Arkansas. Not horribly, but enough that the Department of Education is, you know, has cut funding and required co-payments from some families. There should be cuts — the cuts are planned for providers to go in pretty soon and we’ll see if that actually happens. But they’d like to see some state funding.
Brock: I want to go back to workforce there for a second, because I just don’t see a good solution to this problem. Day-care or child-care workers are very low-wage jobs. You know, it’s already super expensive for child care. I think the average is around $15,000 a year for a family to have a child in a child-care facility while they work. You know, I don’t see how you pay those low-wage workers, which you need more of, and you need them to have a certain skill set. I don’t know how you pay them more money and keep child care more affordable, because it seems like it’s going to increase the cost to do that. Any kind of thoughts on how to address that dilemma?
Bronner: Well, I guess more state funding. The $15,000 was the highest-quality infant care. But no matter what kind of child care, it’s just really pretty expensive for anybody. The report did present ideas about, you know, sort of alternative certifications for, you know, pathways for individuals without a high-school diploma to be able to work in child care. Reciprocity pilot programs with other states. It was another idea, but really, the ideas were mostly, you know, pointed toward, you know, trying to make it easier to find more workers, you know, not pay the ones that are already there.
Brock: Let’s shift to the lithium summit that you covered this week. Arkansas has some pretty rich lithium deposits down in south, southwest Arkansas. But let’s start first with the conversation that I think dominated at this lithium summit. China has a big lead on everyone in the world in terms of mining and processing lithium. Explain that situation.
Bronner: Well, basically, Arkansas is sitting on potentially – potentially a gold mine, lithium. For those who have been following this story, you should. This is one of the biggest stories in business that’s coming. Arkansas, the Smackover formation in south Arkansas. Arkansas is just poised to really, you know, lithium could beat Arkansas what oil was to Texas. We have a lot of it. You know, it is fairly — it is fairly easy and clean to extract here compared to elsewhere. The ones who are trying to do that, of course, will tell you that it’s not easy as I’m making it sound. But compared to alternatives, it can be done here. And Arkansas also is really strong in the fact that we already have a century-old relationship with the brine industry, which is where you kind of get the lithium from. And so or at least the processes are similar. And so what we’ve got is a good regulatory framework already in place. And we’ve got a really welcoming environment for it.
So you know, ExxonMobil, Standard Lithium, Chevron all spoke. And they were all very high on Arkansas. So the problem is that even if we mine it, the midstream from lithium out of the ground to a battery. China controls the whole thing. You know, we would at the moment, send the lithium to China, and China would purify it and put it together and do the processes that would make batteries. So this kind of, you know, this kind of domination of the market puts China in a very good position. And they plan — they did this. They approached this issue many years ago. They strategically planned to do this and they have succeeded. So a lot of the talk at the conference – at least the part that I saw – was we’ve got to find ways to not just dig it out of the ground. But how do we do what we do with it between there and the battery part? How do we, you know, do that mid-stream? And so if that happens and of course Arkansas would be well put, you know, well situated with that because if you mind it, a great place to do all that is right next to where you mine it. So, Arkansas may have – again, the opportunities for Arkansas are tremendous here. You know, just as Arkansas has done so well with retail and steel and everything else, this could be a whole other area where Arkansas could dominate.
Brock: That’s Steve Bronner, reporter with the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal and Talk Business & Politics. You can catch more of our interview at BusinessJournal.com.
That’s all for this edition of the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal Report. I’m your host, Roby Brock. We’ll see you next time.
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