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Kentucky’s $231.8 million Medicaid deficit hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves given increasing enrollment in the indigent healthcare program, but reality may be about to catch up to us.

The Wall Street Journal reports more than 25 states are trimming Medicaid benefits. Kentucky is not one of them.

The Journal reports:

“As it stands now, the stimulus legislation would require states to retain or restore Medicaid eligibility levels to those of July 1, 2008, but it wouldn’t prevent states from making benefit or provider cuts.”

Nevada is looking at “eliminating Medicaid coverage for low-income pregnant mothers” and has already cut othodontics and vision coverage from its SCHIP program.

In order to avoid similar cuts, Kentucky officials are going to have to drop their intransigence on labor union reform for starters. And we are still looking for the $180 million a year in Gov. Steve Beshear’s promised efficiency study.

More serious than Beshear’s campaign puffery is the need to gain a proper accounting of our education system. If we can’t get serious about increasing accountability for Kentucky’s political class, the underprivileged will pay the price.

Here is a great advertisement going in the New York Times sometime in the next week. The Cato Institute bought the ad with a slew of economists signing on who disagree with President Barack Obama’s ridiculous statement that everyone agrees we can spending ourselves into a huge hole and then spend ourselves right back out.

To read the ad, click here. And if you see University of Kentucky’s John Garen, University of Louisville’s Stephan Gohmann, or Western Kentucky University’s Dennis Wilson or Brian Strow around the Bluegrass State, congratulate them on their good judgment.

The Kentucky Education and Workforce Development Cabinet just reported the state’s unemployment rate climbed to 7.8% in December, its worst rate since May 1988.

Fighting the trend and continuing its remarkable growth rate was the government sector, again, which actually increased by 1200 jobs last month.

And they want to raise taxes.

Probably without fully understanding what they were writing, the Times Leader Online reports on January 23, 2009 that, “A state recalibration of school district scores under the Commonwealth Accountability Testing System puts the local district closer to a goal of 100 percent student proficiency by 2014.”

Imagine that. By the stroke of a pen, suddenly the local district’s schools are closer to the CATS goal. Does anyone think that paperwork shuffle suddenly changed education performance for even one single child?

It’s just what we said here and here had happened when the CATS scoring scales were reset, and further inflated, by changes in 2007.

In fact, we’ve shown in detail that CATS scoring was getting inflated even before the massive 2007 changes came along.

So, while the Times Leader actually says something that is correct, the article still doesn’t seem to get it – this isn’t a sign that Kentucky public schools are getting better. It’s just more evidence that CATS is being watered down to make us think that is happening.

The new reality is inescapable: worldwide economic difficulties would have created more outsourcing of jobs anyway. Does anyone really think more massive federal bailouts, new laws to strengthen labor unions, new policies to limit free trade, higher taxes, and the specter of a growing social welfare system will do anything but accelerate the growth of this trend?

Take a few minutes to watch this eye-opening video and then try to make an argument for more big government saving us from our big government folly:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fng-lZPM5W0]
If we are not teaching our children entrepreneurial skills we are doing them a terrible disservice. At the very least, Kentucky should rethink policies that send employers running faster to Costa Rica and Philippines. Some of those policies are forced unionism, corporate welfare, and out-of-control government spending.

In times of plenty, too few people want to seriously consider the order of priorities in our system of self-government. Spending wins votes, plain and simple. So our elected representatives spend.

In that sense — and at least until the state bailout money comes in the mail — any reflection caused by the current turmoil has the potential to do good.

What, for instance, defines success in a government program? In the business world or in our homes, we attack a problem until it is no longer a problem. Or at least until it becomes less of a problem and can, therefore, be worked around.

Government usually doesn’t work that way. And all too often, government’s media cheerleaders make the problem worse.

Take as an example the Lexington Herald Leader’s grief over the demise of Kentucky Homeplace, whose closure will save $2 million annually:

This “investment” has provided a valuable service by accessing charity medical products for people of limited means whose income disqualified them for Medicaid. Rather than spending the last fifteen years developing an ongoing constituency and a justification for its continuing existence, Kentucky Homeplace should have been showing people how to gain this access for themselves, their friends, relatives, and neighbors. (It’s not that hard. Use Google.)

If this approach had been taken fifteen years ago, the closing of Kentucky Homeplace would be met with satisfaction for a job well done and for lives improved. Instead, we only hear whining and crying by those frustrated in their efforts to expand government: