Beshear to Dems: Run on Obamacare

Attention Alison: Take your fingers out of your ears, stop yelling "lalalala I can't hear you" and listen to Kentucky's - and the South's - most successful Democratic elected official.

From the Courier:

For congressional Democrats worried about the toll Obamacare might take on their re-election chances next fall, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear delivered a surprising message.

“You know what Democrats ought to run on next November? The idea that we want every American to have affordable health care,” the two-term Democrat said Thursday.

Beshear spoke to House Democrats in a closed-door meeting about his state’s experience with implementation of the Affordable Care Act. The commonwealth has become “the gold standard” for implementation thus far, Beshear said, with heavy interest from residents and 69,000 enrollments so far.

“We showed that the system can work and will work,” Beshear said.

With rank-and-file Democrats frustrated at the Obama administration’s bungled rollout of the health law, particularly glitches at the federal portal, HealthCare.gov, party leaders invited Beshear to talk about how the law can succeed where implemented successfully.

Kentucky’s story is particularly compelling as a conservative state where just one of the congressional delegation’s eight members is a Democrat. The state Legislature is also divided, with Democrats controlling the House and Republicans the Senate.

Beshear, though, successfully pushed for creating the state’s own health exchange, and also decided to expand its Medicaid rolls, taking advantage of a provision of the law in which the federal government picks up the entire cost for the first few years. After long study of the issue, experts told him that his state “couldn’t afford not to.”

With his state’s poor health statistics, Beshear said he knew it would take a “transformative tool” to reverse the trend. The president’s health care law proved to be just that tool.

During Thursday’s meeting, Beshear told lawmakers about how a tea party Republican told him how much he hated Obamacare, but changed his tune after visiting the state’s website and finding out he qualified for Medicaid.

“This is going to change the face of Kentucky in the next decade,” Beshear told Democrats, according to a participant in the meeting. “This going to change the face of America.”

Beshear urged lawmakers to take a long view of the law, saying it would be wrong to grade the law based on its first months. “It’s not about websites or process, it’s about people,” he said.

Later, joined by the House Democratic leadership for a news conference, Beshear said the climate of uncertainty over the law was worsened by an “avalanche of misinformation” put out by the law’s critics.

“I have a U.S. senator who keeps saying Kentuckians don’t want this,” he said, referring to Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s minority leader. “Well, the facts don’t prove that out.

“They’re confused about it, just as people in Kentucky have been confused about it,” he said. “But just like in Kentucky when folks elsewhere get the information, they like what they find, and they will sign up in droves.”

Beshear said the new health law could be an issue in McConnell’s re-election campaign, and midterm elections in general, next year.

“People are going to start looking at the critics and saying, ‘What was all that yelling and screaming about? I think you must have misinformed us,’ ” Beshear said.

By next fall, Democratic candidates who are not running on Obamacare are going to look stupid. Especially after they lose.