Mike Ross

Michael Avery Ross (born August 2, 1961) is an American businessman and politician.

During the 1980s, Ross was also vice president for colleges for the Young Democrats of Arkansas and served for many years on the Democratic Party of Arkansas's state committee and its executive committee.

Ross previously served on the Nevada County Quorum Court from 1983 to 1985 and as chief of staff to then-lieutenant governor Winston Bryant from 1985 to 1989.

In 1990, Ross was elected to the Arkansas State Senate becoming the legislature's youngest member at that time, where he served as chair of the Senate Children and Youth Committee.

During his tenure, Ross worked alongside future governor Mike Beebe to help pass the Arkansas Academic Challenge scholarship program.

He was also a member of the Arkansas Senate from 1991 to 2001, a member of the Nevada County Quorum Court from 1983 to 1985, and a small business owner.

Ross was a member of the Arkansas State Senate for ten years (1991–2001), before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for Arkansas's 4th congressional district in 2000.

Ross served in the state senate ten years, until his election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000.

A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the U.S. representative for AR's 4th congressional district from 2001 to 2013 and was his party's nominee for governor of Arkansas in 2014.

He is currently the last Democrat to have represented Arkansas in the House of Representatives.

He faced the Republican nominee, former U.S. Representative Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas's 3rd congressional district, who had previously lost the 2006 gubernatorial election to Democrat Mike Beebe.

Ross lost to Hutchinson, ending his undefeated electoral streak.

Ross is an officer and senior vice president at Little Rock-based Southwest Power Pool, which manages the electric grid and operates the wholesale electric market for all or parts of 14 states.

Ross was born in Texarkana, Arkansas.

On June 19, 2009, Ross made clear that he and a group of other fiscally conservative, moderate Democrats, known as the Blue Dog Coalition, were increasingly unhappy with the direction that health-care legislation was taking in the House.

They claimed the health care reform bill was being written behind closed doors without their input and that the proposals being consider fall short in reducing costs and increasing efficiency, outlining only a fraction of what will be required to achieve a product that does not add to the deficit.

Ross was thrust into the national spotlight on July 21 when he and a group of seven Blue Dog Democrats on Energy & Commerce bucked their party's leaders and brought the committee mark up process of H.R. 3200, America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, to a halt.

(This piece of legislation would eventually die and never receive a vote on the House floor. H.R. 3962, Affordable Health Care for America Act, is the House health care reform bill that would eventually be considered by the House of Representatives, and Ross voted against that bill.) House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman postponed meeting publicly to discuss the health-care legislation to negotiate with the Blue Dogs, meeting privately with Ross and other members of the so-called Blue Dog Coalition, conservative Democrats who sit on the committee and could join Republicans and vote down a bill they don't like since the panel has 36 Democrats and 23 Republicans.

After days of back-to-back meetings and intense negotiations into the night, four of the seven Blue Dog Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, led by Ross, said they resolved their differences with Chairman Henry Waxman of California and were able to force House leadership to agree on several provisions, namely that the full House would not vote on the legislation until at least September so lawmakers would have time to read the bill and listen to constituents.

Other concessions won by Blue Dogs, which drew immediate opposition from liberals in the chamber, would shave about 10 percent from the health care overhaul's $1 trillion, 10-year price tag, in part by limiting subsidies to people who are not insured.

The exemption for small businesses would be doubled so that only businesses with payrolls greater than $500,000 a year would be required to offer insurance or pay a tax equivalent to 8 percent of their payroll.

Because many Blue Dogs, especially Ross, had serious concerns about the bill's potential harmful effects on rural doctors and rural hospitals, the group forced House leadership to accept that the government would negotiate rates with health care providers instead of using Medicare rates in any so-called public option.

However, some of the concessions to Ross set off a revolt among members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who said they feared that the public insurance plan was being weakened.

"We do not support this," said Representative Lynn Woolsey, Democrat of California, co-chairwoman of the progressive caucus.

"It's a nonstarter."

After Congress' August recess, Ross announced that he could not support a bill with a Public Option.

On July 25, 2011, Ross announced that he would not seek reelection to the House in 2012.

Ross considered running for the position of Democratic Caucus Vice Chairman for the 110th Congress; however, he deferred to incumbent John Larson after Rahm Emanuel chose to run for caucus chair, which was the position for which Larson had been running.

Ross has consistently voted against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare.

He was one of three Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives to vote to repeal Obamacare and continued to vote to repeal the law throughout his tenure in Congress.

In a statement after his vote in January 2011, Mike Ross said: "I have said from the beginning that I believe we absolutely need health care reform, but we need commonsense health care reform that reflects Arkansas values. This law was more than 2,000 pages, cut Medicare by half a trillion dollars, placed huge unfunded mandates on our states and authorized the IRS to fine people who can't afford to buy health insurance. An overwhelming majority of my constituents continue to oppose this health care reform law and I believe we should repeal it, start over and listen to the majority of the American people—not the special interests and party leaders in Washington."

Ross supports Arkansas's bipartisan Medicaid expansion known as the "private option" – the state's plan to use federal Medicaid money to pay for private insurance for people earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level.

Ross said that "although he voted against the Affordable Care Act, he supports the private option, which he called an 'Arkansas-specific, bipartisan and market-based solution' that helps working families. Arkansas' private option is a great example of what we can accomplish when we listen to one another and work together in a bipartisan way, and, as governor, I will support the law and its continued funding."

A fifth-generation Arkansan, he lived for many years in Prescott until relocating in 2013 to the capital city of Little Rock.

The grandson of farmers and a nurse and the son of two public school educators, he graduated from high school in Hope, Arkansas and earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, working his way through college as a local radio announcer.

Along with his wife Holly (divorced 2021), who is a pharmacist, they owned and operated a pharmacy and home medical equipment business in his hometown of Prescott, from 1993 until they sold it in 2007.

By the age of 20, Ross was driving and staffing then former governor Bill Clinton as he successfully waged his "come back" campaign for a second term as Governor of Arkansas.

Ross left Congress on January 3, 2013, after choosing not to seek a seventh term and after a brief stint in the private sector as an officer and senior vice president at the Little Rock-based non-profit Southwest Power Pool, he announced his candidacy for Governor of Arkansas on April 17, 2013.

After an unsuccessful bid for governor, he returned to Southwest Power Pool, a regional transmission organization that manages the electric grid and operates the wholesale electric market for all or part of 14 states, where he currently serves as an officer and senior Vice President.

He instead became the Democratic nominee for governor of Arkansas in the general election scheduled for November 4, 2014.