Former Gov. Steve Beshear: Medicaid expansion changed course of Kentucky history

When former Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear took office in 2007, the Bluegrass State had many challenges — not the least of which was lack of health care for working folks — and limited resources to address them. “Kentucky faced a number of fundamental weaknesses, not unlike Mississippi and a lot of other Southern states,” Beshear recently told Mississippi Today. “We had a lack of educational attainment. We had a workforce that wasn’t as trained or agile as the marketplace would demand. We had too many children getting a poor start in life. We had an economy that wasn’t as diversified as it needed to be. And one of the biggest fundamental weaknesses we had was a population that wasn’t healthy.”