As Obamacare’s rollout floundered in 2013, President Barack Obama repeatedly took solace in Kentucky’s success. The state’s exchange, known as Kynect, worked virtually glitch-free and helped sign up tens of thousands of uninsured people. Obama even invited outgoing Gov. Steve Beshear to his 2014 State of the Union and praised him as “a man possessed” by his crusade to make the president’s law work in a state where the Obama himself isn’t particularly beloved.
Gallup polling shows Kentucky saw the second biggest drop in its uninsured rate in the country, behind only Arkansas.
Yet, Republican gubernatorial nominee Matt Bevin, a tea party favorite who narrowly won a brutal primary last month and could run a competitive general election race, has made eliminating the state’s Obamacare programs — and sharply curtailing the ranks of the newly insured — a central plank of his platform. If he wins this November, more than half a million people who got covered through the exchange or an Obamacare-proscribed expansion of Medicaid could find themselves in health care limbo.
Beshear, a Democrat and the only southern governor to fully implement and champion the cause of the Affordable Care Act, is furious.
“I am not going to allow someone to become governor of this state who wants to take us back to the 19th century,” he said in a phone interview. “For a serious candidate for governor to be advocating a simple repeal of the whole program without offering any kind of alternative which will continue health care for these people is irresponsible.”
