Matt Bevin’s campaign was cooked. The RGA had pulled its support and liberal blogs were writing his obituary. Then a curious thing happened. The polls were wrong, and Bevin swept to victory by a decent margin, leaving many shocked.
So what happened?
Obamacare, mostly.
Kentucky Republicans view Tuesday’s election results as a mandate to dismantle one of the country’s most heralded health care programs in the name of fiscal responsibility.
Outgoing Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear used an executive order to expand the eligibility requirements of Kentucky’s Medicaid program, insuring an additional 400,000 people and reducing the state’s uninsured rate from 20 percent in 2013 to 9 percent by the middle of this year.
But those 400,000 people were more than twice what state officials had originally projected. Combined with the existing Medicaid program, Kentucky taxpayers now pay for the health insurance of a quarter of the state’s population. The state will begin paying for the expansion in 2017, and costs could surpass $300 million by 2020.
There’s a difference between health insurance and health care, as conservatives were fond of reminding Obamacare advocates. You can write a law promising people anything, but it won’t mean a thing if that law creates economic impossibility. In this case, Kentucky voters were met with soaring costs and hospitals losing money, as the expansinon pushed by Beshear was simply unsustainable.
Obamacare may have lost at the Supreme Court, but voters are starting to realize what a disaster it is, and Kentucky may be the first domino to fall.
AAN Staff
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