Another showdown in Kentucky -- on health care

Yes, Kim Davis went back to her job Monday as County Clerk, where she says she will not interfere with the deputy clerks issuing marriage licenses;  but she also will not authorize them, and she questions whether they will therefore be valid.  But that is a showdown for another day perhaps.

The showdown I refer to here is in the Kentucky governor's race and it involves health care.  The candidates are Attorney General Jack Conway, a Democrat;  and Tea Party candidate Matt Bevin, who gave Mitch McConnell a good scare in the Republican senate primary last year.

Bevin is on a crusade to get rid of Kentucky's very successful health care system Kynect -- a major Obamacare success story that has earned national acclaim.   Under Gov. Beshear's leadership, Kentucky set up both a state-run insurance exchange and an expansion of Medicaid that together have provided affordable health insurance to more than 500,000 Kentuckians in the first year alone.

According to a Gallup poll, the uninsured rate in Kentucky fell from 20.4% in 2013 to just 9%.   Furthermore, Kentuckians like it.   And yet Bevin says he will do away with both the exchange and reverse the Medicaid expansion.   Beshear was quoted in ThinkProgress:  "It terrifies me. . . .  Matt Bevin is just going to take it from every single one of them — just because he doesn’t like the fact that President Obama was the one that got it passed.”

He has reason to worry.  Recent polls show a tight race between Bevin and Conway, who would continue the Kynect plan.   So, in a sense, the election is a referendum on health care, despite Kynect's popularity and success.

Bevin is a millionaire on a crusade who promises to “bring relief from Obamacare to the taxpayers of Kentucky. . . .  Closing Kynect would begin to free Kentucky from this financially ill-advised program and leave Obamacare management in the hands of the federal government.”

On the contrary, according to ThinkProgress, "As of now, the programs don’t actually cost state taxpayers anything. Kentucky received $264 million from the federal government for the development of Kynect, and private insurance companies pay for the system’s operation.

"As for the Medicaid expansion, the federal government currently pays the entire tab, and will continue to do so until 2017. After 2017, Kentucky will begin paying 2 percent of the cost of the expansion, which will increase yearly until the state eventually pays 10 percent in 2021. By then, the state estimates, the program will have saved enough money and created enough jobs to more than offset the cost."

Beshear says Bevin doesn't understand the system, and no one has yet pinned him down with the facts.    Bevin conflates the Medicaid expansion and the exchange where people buy private insurance.  “His statements in general just talk about Obamacare, and ‘we’ve got to do away with the whole thing,’ and he doesn’t really distinguish between the exchange and Medicaid.”

Bevin also preaches the Tea Party line on the 10th Amendment, claiming that state governments do not have to follow federal laws they don't like.    Bevin folds this argument into his rant against “federal government overreach.”

A report from the year after the expansion of Medicaid found that 12,000 health-care related jobs had been created and estimate that to double over the next eight years.    
Data also show a staggering increase in preventative care services like physical exams, diabetes and cancer screenings, and flu shots -- in a state ranked as one of the sickest states in America just a decade ago.

In other words, the people of Kentucky would be stupid to elect Matt Bevin.  Unfortunately one of the strengths of the Tea Party seems to be its ability to incite and manipulate people's stupidity.    Kim Davis might get the publicity, but the governor's race in Kentucky should be the showdown story now.

Ralph

thanks to Emily Atkin and Josh Israel at ThinkProgress for the background for this story.