This week in news, right across the Ohio river, former Kentucky Governor Steven Beshear has launched a campaign to stop now Governor, Bevin, from getting rid of the state run health exchange. Part of Bevin’s political platform was to dismantle the expanded Medicaid program and he has started the process since taking office. Bevin has stated that “we can’t afford to have 25 to 30 percent of us on Medicaid”. All the while, Kentucky has one of the top five poverty levels in the nation. Is Kentucky’s new Governor acting on behave of his elected population or is he acting on a political agenda? When faced with the mounting evidence of how Kentuckians have benefited from the expanded Medicaid program, Bevin, has little evidence to mount his defense.
A national study found the number of children in Kentucky with no health coverage, has dropped 20,000 from 69,000 in 2013 to 49,000 in 2014 under the federal health law. A Gallup role found that Kentuckians with no insurance dropped from 20 percent to 7.5, the highest drop of uninsured residents in the nation. The national average being around 11 percent. Would this drop occur if the expanded Medicaid program was not established in the first place? Nearly 425,000 Kentuckians have enrolled in Medicaid and over 100,000 have enrolled in the state run health program all of which would have to transition to the federal health exchange by this November.
Lukas Allen
Communicating Health, Science and the Environment 
I like that you turned to politics for this blog post, as this is a controversial topic and usually a very weighty one. What I mean by the latter is that there are so many factors that play into poverty in a nation as well as a state alone, the agendas of governmental leaders, and the issues they put above others in order to change “x” or “y” issues. I would imagine that, even though Medicaid has been extremely beneficial to those who live in Kentucky, if they cannot afford it then there may be no choice than to cut back. I would also hypothesize that this is a problem in several states across the U.S.
-Mattie Martin
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Thanks for vocalizing this local and urgent issue, Lukas.
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