Kentucky is paying $270 million to kick people off Medicaid. Where's the dignity in that?

Brandi Button works three part-time jobs that she loves: as an adjunct professor at Western Kentucky University, a Montessori teacher in Glasgow and at a non-profit called Sustainable Glasgow.

None of them offer healthcare, so Kentucky’s Medicaid expansion allowed her to cover her husband and two children for the first time.

“We were in the in-between group, not far enough below the poverty line to get Medicaid, but we didn’t make enough to buy insurance,” Button said. “For a long time I felt the pressure to do something I don’t love, work that I’m not passionate about, just so I could afford health insurance, but with the expansion, I can do the things I’m passionate about.”

Button is one of thousands of success stories that came out of the Medicaid expansion adopted by former Gov. Steve Beshear in 2013. The expansion covered the “working poor,” people who earned up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level.

Read more: https://www.kentucky.com/opinion/linda-blackford/article236195478.html