Last Call For I'd Rather Die Than...

Again, if you're still wondering why and how thousands of Kentuckians voted to take their own Medicaid away from themselves and their neighbors by electing Matt Bevin, the story of Borden County, Texas will be very illuminating.

In rural Borden County, 12 people signed up for Obamacare this year. 

Livid over the government telling them they must buy something and loath to take anything that looks like a “handout,” the uninsured here are likely to stay that way. As Obamacare’s third open enrollment season began Sunday, this rock-solid conservative community of about 650 people offers a window into the challenges health law advocates face to expand coverage around the country.

“Health care is fine, if you can afford it,” said Brenda Copeland, a middle-aged woman who works at the Coyote Country Store and café, along with her two grown daughters, all of whom are uninsured. Copeland has had health insurance only once in her life, and opted to pay Obamacare’s tax penalty earlier this year rather than buy a plan. 

“I hope Obamacare goes down the toilet,” she added. 

Turning around that kind of entrenched hostility — and convincing people they can afford Obamacare plans — are among the biggest challenges facing the administration as it rolls out the health law’s third enrollment period against the backdrop of a presidential campaign whose winner could determine the law’s fate. Winning new converts like Copeland is key — not just to boost the law’s political standing but to enable its online insurance markets to flourish. But by now most people have heard about the law — even if they have limited or even erroneous understandings about what it might mean for their own pocketbooks. And despite the law’s success in bringing about a historic drop in the uninsured, many don’t like what they’ve heard. 

This is Texas, after all, one of the most anti-Obamacare states in the country, and people here have heard plenty from politicians about why they should demand the repeal of President Barack Obama’s health law.

Understand that there are millions of Americans who would rather suffer drastic health insurance consequences, up to and including dire economic and health consequences than take a "handout" from a black President.

Matt Bevin turned Kynect back into Obamacare.

He will be governor a month from now as a direct result.

Those Black Lives Actually Do Matter

There goes FOX's Shepard Smith, inconveniently reminding his viewers that the death of Illinois cop Lt. Joseph Gliniewicz was an elaborate suicide ploy used to cover up his years of criminal corruption, and not "assassination by Black Lives Matter terrorists" as the right wanted you to believe.

“Think of the narrative that came out of that from so many, many places, about, ‘It’s the fault of the Black Lives Matter movement,'” Smith told guest Dan Schorr. “All of this stuff that was just, it really turned up the rhetoric and it really was factually wrong.”

Several conservatives quickly declared Gliniewicz a victim in the so-called “war on cops” when his body was found in a remote area of the small community in September.

But authorities in Fox Lake confirmed this week that Gliniewicz actually committed suicide after reporting a false pursuit of three “suspicious men” — prompting a huge manhunt that turned up empty. The 30-year veteran also reportedly tried to hire a gang member to kill a local administrator who was on the verge of revealing that he had embezzled thousands of dollars from a youth program in order to pay for his mortgage and gym membership, among other personal expenses.

“Today it got disgusting,” Smith said of Gliniewicz’s apparent attempt to have the official killed.

Schorr, a former prosecutor, said one of the lessons of this case is for observers to “not jump to big conclusions.”

“You have to find out all the facts first,” he said.

“Don’t get ahead of the news,” Smith responded, adding, “It will run you over.”

Don't get me wrong, police officers are killed in the line of duty.  But the effort to suggest that Black Lives Matter is leading a race war to assassinate white police officers, and that the rates of police being killed somehow constitutes a "new and deadly War on Cops" that justifies racist harassment of BLM is insane...and as Shep reminds us, "disgusting".

Welcome To Bevinstan, Con't

Governor-elect Matt Bevin wasted little time Thursday morning letting Kentucky know exactly what will happen to hundreds of thousands of us when he's sworn in next month.   Here he is speaking with Elizabeth Hasselbeck on FOX and Friends (check the 1:48 mark):

HASSELBECK: Let me ask you this, for the locals watching. Ah, are you going to follow through with your plan to dismantle Kynect, that's the state's health insurance plan?

BEVIN: Absolutely.  Oh my goodness, I...Yeah, if those have not followed me closely to figure out, I made very very few promises...

HASSLEBECK: Right.

BEVIN: ...I made very few claims, those things I said I would do, I am going to do, no question about it, yes.

Let's keep in mind Bevin's also said he would reverse Medicaid expansion too.

Now, lately he's made noises about submitting a federal waiver and shifting 400,000 plus people to a private insurance Medicaid alternative like Indiana has, but that's going to be real hard without, you know, something to administrate Medicare alternative plans for hundreds of thousands of individuals and families statewide like, I dunno, say something along the lines of a GODDAMN STATE INSURANCE EXCHANGE LIKE KYNECT *breathes heavily*

Sigh.

Meanwhile, in Frankfort, it looks like a lot of people currently employed by the Commonwealth and getting insurance through their employer are suddenly going to be needing to shop individual insurance plans in 2016, Kynect or no Kynect.

Among those hopeful about the transition is Martin Cothran, senior policy adviser for the Family Foundation of Kentucky. “It’s going to be a big change in policy in this state, I think … to have the governor’s office in the hands of somebody who really wants to make some conservative change is heartening.”

Cothran said, “We’ve elected a governor who has expressed strong support for religious freedom, who is also in favor of charter schools. So we are hopeful some of the policy statements he made during the campaign are realized.”

But David Smith, executive director of the Kentucky Association of State Employees, is worried about Bevin's promises as a candidate to “shrink the size of government.”

Bevin said in an interview with The Courier-Journal last month, “Every department, every cabinet, every single area of government will have to tighten their budgets to the absolute degree possible.”

Smith said he fears Bevin will cut too deeply in areas the new governor does not consider priorities.

“We’re expecting cuts to personnel right off the bat, we anticipate the possibility of privatization of parks service,” Smith said. “I hope what he said in his acceptance speech about trying to bring everybody in Kentucky together for the best solutions is true. … But for now, I would say 99 percent of state workers feel concerned about what’s coming next: Where are we going to be cut? Is there a possibility I won’t even have a job come July?”

 Guess you have to ruin a few hundred thousand lives in order to run Kentucky like a business.

StupidiNews!

• NASA has announced that data from the MAVEN spacecraft reveals that Mars lost its water over billions of years as solar winds stripped oxygen and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
• A global chemical weapons watchdog NGO confirms that mustard gas was used in an August attack in Syria, but it's not at all clear by whom.
• Doctors Without Borders says that a US airstrike on its hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan last month was deliberate, citing witness reports of the US plane targeting people fleeing.
• Art by Van Gogh and Picasso led a $726 million art auction in New York this week, but Sotheby's semi-annual art auction is fetching far smaller totals than 2013's record haul.
• Dozens of cities, towns, and counties in Colorado passed local referendums Tuesday to allow municipal broadband networks, something state law bans without ballot measures.