Fresh off a meeting with President Donald Trump, Gov. Matt Bevin took aim at the Affordable Care Act and the man Democrats have selected to offer a rebuttal to Trump's first State of the Union Address.
Just one day before Trump takes the stage for his debut before a joint session of Congress, the president met with Bevin and other governors from across the country. Emerging from those meetings, Bevin told the Fox Business Network that his predecessor, Democrat Steve Beshear, ushered in a "unmitigated disaster" by embracing Obama-era federal health reforms.
"The net result of it has been a remarkable decline in access to health coverage. More people covered, but covered by what? Fewer people able to actually even see a doctor. Fifty percent of our counties there's only a single health care provider on the coverage front," the governor said.
It's a statement bound to raise hackles among the state's shrinking Democratic caucus in Frankfort. Lexington Rep. Reggie Thomas said he agrees the state need more competition among insurers, but called Bevin's plan "throwing the baby out with the bath water."
"Let me tell you what's a disaster. Disaster is taking that half a million people off of insurance and making our insured go back up to twenty, twenty-five percent. That's a disaster," he told WUKY.
In a piece published on Fox News Opinion Monday, the governor described much of the media criticism of Trump as unwarranted and unfair and cheered the new president's repeal of an EPA stream rule, which the governor said would have eliminated tens of thousands of coal jobs.
