Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Matt Bevin Promises to Kill Thousands of Kentuckians

Yes, he is.  Because half a millions Kentuckians have health care now thanks to Obamacare and Medicaid expansion, and Bevin is swearing to destroy both.  That's premeditating murder of thousands of Kentuckians. Somebody arrest this motherfucker.

Think Progress:

Though it has been largely ignored by national media and pollsters, Kentucky’s November gubernatorial election could mean striking changes for the Bluegrass State. The nation’s most unlikely Obamacare success story — a state system that has provided more than 500,000 Kentuckians with affordable health insurance — might well be ransacked by a Tea Party candidate named Matt Bevin.

SNIP

But with Beshear term-limited, Bevin, the GOP nominee, has made it clear he wants to reverse course. The Tea Party-backed candidate vows he’ll do away with both the successful state exchange and the Medicaid expansion that has helped hundreds of thousands get affordable health care — moves that the governor could likely make unilaterally.

It’s a prospect that worries many state-based health experts, business groups, and public officials who spoke to ThinkProgress about the upcoming election and the state of Kentucky’s health care system. One of those officials was Beshear himself, who accused Bevin of playing politics with the hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians who now have insurance for the first time.

“It terrifies me,” Beshear said. “There’s over 300,000 [Kentuckians that are on expanded Medicaid], and 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.”

Despite Kynect’s popularity and growing support among conservatives for the system, the most recent polls show Bevin locked in a tight race with current Attorney General Jack Conway (D), who has indicated he would continue the state’s current health care regime. So the questions are surely worth asking — who is Matt Bevin? And what would happen to Kentucky’s health care system if he won?

SNIP

Beshear hopes Bevin will not be his successor, in part because of his adamant and seemingly unwavering stance against Kynect. “It has nothing to do with the benefits or the arguments for or against it,” he said. “It’s just the fact that, who the president was at the time it was passed, makes him automatically against it. And that’s about as short-sighted as you can be. ”

But the end of Kynect is not some far-fetched possibility. The most recent data, a Public Policy Polling survey in June, showed Bevin leading Democratic nominee Jack Conway 40 to 38. With voter turnout typically low in “off-year” Kentucky elections, it is anybody’s guess who will succeed Beshear in January. For hundreds of thousands of people, that result could well determine whether they return to the ranks of the uninsured.
To his credit, Jack Conway is foursquare in support of both "kynect" and Medicaid expansion. But he is losing this race because he's running a campaign that is a carbon copy of how Alison Lundergan Grimes lost the U.S. Senate race last year by 15 points to the most hated man in the Commonwealth.

No comments: