Bevin’s health plan was cruel to vulnerable Kentuckians. Beshear was right to end it.
Back in October, I interviewed a woman named Brandi Button from Glasgow who worked three jobs, none of which offered health insurance. Luckily, Kentucky’s Medicaid expansion allowed her to get healthcare coverage for her husband and two children for the first time.
She was worried about Gov. Matt Bevin’s attempt to get a federal waiver to curb those benefits, not because she doesn’t work, but because more federal reporting requirements could make an already onerous system even worse.
Gov. Andy Beshear took away that fear Monday in one of the most important moves of his young administration: Stopping the Medicaid waiver started by the Bevin administration that would have curtailed health insurance to thousands of people while costing the state about $270 million. About 95,000 Kentuckians were expected to lose coverage, six years after then. Gov. Steve Beshear’s embrace of the Affordable Care Act changed the state’s uninsured rate from 14 percent to 5 percent.
Andy Beshear talked about the moral and faith-based aspect to his decision, saying that healthcare is a basic right. The expansion covered more than 479,000 people, which in turn as allowed more children to be enrolled in K-CHIP; it has allowed more people access to preventative care, like colo-rectal screening, which saves lives, Medicaid expansion also helped more people get into treatment for the opioid use disorders that have ravaged the state.
But there’s also a more pragmatic argument, which is that wider access healthcare is good for the economy. People who get cancer screenings need less cancer treatment, which saves money. It’s also been estimated that the expansion created 14,000 jobs, many of them in hospitals in rural areas, where people need jobs and healthcare. The federal government pays for $3 dollars of every $1 Kentucky provides to the now 1.4 million Kentuckians on Medicaid.
“Medicaid is a great deal for the state and a boon to our economy,” said Dustin Pugel, policy analyst with the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy. “This decision to abandon costly and harmful barriers to Medicaid not only ensures that our historic gains in coverage can continue, but that billions in federal dollars, thousands of new jobs, and a healthier workforce can remain intact; this is good news for the commonwealth.”
Beshear campaigned on three promises: To deliver the state Board of Education into pro-public school hands, to restore voting rights to non-violent offenders who have completed their sentences and to end the Bevin administration’s costly and destructive attempts to destroy Kentucky’s Medicaid expansion. In his sixth day in office, he fulfilled all three, but none is more important than the Medicaid waiver, because none has a more dramatic effect on the direct well-being of Kentuckians.
We’ve heard a lot about how elections have consequences. Bevin’s policy was in line with hard-right doctrine that wants a smaller government, but ignored the cruelty to Kentucky’s most vulnerable citizens. Beshear’s promise to stop Bevin’s plan was perhaps the best reason to vote for him, and for now, the most gratifying aspect of his win.
