Bevin’s Medicaid plan slated to start next week. These Democrats pledge to rescind it.
On Monday, the Bevin Administration will begin implementing new Medicaid rules — adding work and community service requirements, premiums, coverage lock-out periods and reporting duties — unless the plan is once again blocked by a federal judge.
The changes, which the state has estimated could knock about 95,000 people off Medicaid, have long been a tenant of Bevin’s political agenda. He’s praised the requirements, saying they will increase quality of care and “restore dignity” to able-bodied Kentuckians who received health insurance under the Medicaid expansion that came with President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
But Democrats vying for a chance to take on Bevin in November see the requirements, and their potential to decrease access to health care, as “immoral” and “callous” and hope to eliminate them should the changes survive legal challenges.
Attorney General Andy Beshear took aim at Bevin as he released his health-care policy proposal in back of the Capitol Tuesday morning, starting his prepared remarks by calling healthcare a “basic human right” and touting the fact that Kentucky went from having around 20 percent of the state uninsured before the expansion to around 7.5 percent after.
“Let me be clear, ending expanded Medicaid will gut, if not end rural health care in most parts of our state,” Beshear said. “So on day one in my term as governor, I will rescind Governor Bevin’s callous Medicaid waiver.”
Former state auditor Adam Edelen, who’s running in the primary against Beshear, also has pledged to rescind the changes if elected and accused Washington and Frankfort politicians of playing “cat and mouse” with Kentuckians’ health care.
“Once again, Andy Beshear is following our campaign’s lead,” Edelen said. “Months ago, I presented my plan for protecting Kentucky’s expanded Medicaid population with a dedicated funding source, so future generations won’t have their health care treated like a political football.”
Rocky Adkins’ called Medicaid an economic development issue and said the program supports the health care industry throughout the state, including in rural areas.
“Expanded Medicaid was a game-changer for Kentucky that has saved lives, improved our collective health and pumped billions of dollars into our economy,” Adkins said. “The work requirements that will be implemented by the current governor will restrict access to necessary care for some of the most vulnerable Kentuckians. He’s wrong and the policies should be reversed.”
Health care became a major talking point for Democrats in the 2018 mid-term elections as national Republicans struggled to navigate the blow-back from their failed attempts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
The issue, though, hasn’t seemed to connect on the state level. In 2015, Bevin handily won Owsley County with 70 percent of the vote, despite the fact that 66 percent of the county’s residents were on Medicaid and Bevin had promised to cut the state’s Medicaid program.
Bevin and his administration have said the costs of expanded Medicaid eligibility are too high to be sustainable. The state will spend about $2.4 billion on Medicaid in 2019 and the federal will government will pitch in another $9.1 billion.
When asked how he would manage the cost of maintaining expanded Medicaid, Beshear said the state would save money by capping how much the state spends on Medicaid prescriptions and by creating a drug affordability board to control the costs of prescription drugs.
“What we don’t get is the supposed savings of Governor Bevin’s very callous move to kick almost 90,000 Kentuckians off their coverage,” Beshear said. “But any of their costs are dwarfed by the savings we would get on prescription drugs. New York’s Medicaid spending cap, in it’s first year alone, saved them almost a billion dollars.”
The state of New York has around 7 million people on Medicaid, almost double the population of Kentucky.
Edelen said money to support Medicaid would come from tax reform he would persuade the Kentucky legislature to approve. Edelen has backed a tax on health care providers to help pay for Medicaid expansion.