Slideshow: HONK if you think health care is a human right

We've seen loads of clever protest signs in 2025, but these "HONK!" specimens spotted at the corner of Markham and Broadway Monday afternoon might be our favorite. So punchy! So multipurpose! So satisfying. Hoooooooooonk!

The squad working the corners Monday was protesting cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) that will make health insurance more expensive for many, while pulling it off the table entirely for others.

Gov. Sarah Sanders' attempt to spin the double-digit rate increases for people who buy subsidized health insurance on the Arkansas marketplace as a win for which she alone is responsible is a joke. You can get caught up on why that is by reading this story.

At the national level, consider that an estimated 16 million people will likely lose health coverage thanks to Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill. Hospitals will still treat the sick and injured, even if these patients are too poor to pay. But health care providers may no longer be able to tap into public funds to cover the costs. That spells doom for rural hospitals and threatens to create health care deserts that will leave entire swaths of the population dangerously far away from emergency care.

Democrats and Republicans are locking horns in D.C. today over a looming government shutdown, with Democrats unwilling to OK a budget that cuts health care for poor and middle-income people in order to hand more tax cuts to the wealthy. Republicans say Democrats are the bad guys here. Vice President JD Vance even said Dems, by declining to support the Republicans' trickle-down plan, have guns to the American people's heads. (Vance has never been great at reading the room.) Funding to keep the federal government rolling ends today unless someone blinks, and I wouldn't bet on Vance blinking. It might muss his eyeliner.

Monday's protest was organized by 50501 Arkansas and Arkansas Community Organizations. Here's what it looked like: