Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?

The State of the State is ignorant and uninformed (and seemingly proud of it).

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback gave his State of the State address tonight.  It was filled with the usual platitudes about how well things are going here in Kansas (some might have called them delusions).  But what caught my attention was the unforced error that demonstrated just how empty Brownback's rhetoric is and how uninformed this administration is about health policy.

Brownback went through the de rigueur criticisms of the Affordable Care Act (or, more accurately "Obamacare;"  Brownback would never use the actual name of the law).  He patted himself on the back for defying the law and resisting the expansion of the Medicaid program that would cover 150,000 Kansans.  And he demonstrated that he knows very little about the law other than how to repeat inaccurate talking points.

Gov. Brownback derided Obamacare by pointing out the failure of most of the 23 state health insurance exchanges established under the law.  The problem is that there have never been 23 state exchanges.  In his ignorance, he (or his speechwriters) confused state insurance exchanges with CO-OP insurance plans.  While it's true that most of the CO-OPs have failed, these start-up insurance plans are very different animals than the state insurance exchanges (or marketplaces) established under the ACA.

This confusion has been showing up in talking points of ACA opponents for several months.  That Brownback would simply repeat this blunder, and that nobody on his staff, including Lt. Governor Colyer, a physician and the administration's presumed health policy expert, caught and corrected the mistake should tell you all you need to know.

This is a Governor and an administration that simply doesn't understand health policy and doesn't seem to care.  They're adamantly opposed to the ACA, but they clearly know very little about it.

In 1962, manager Casey Stengel responded to the New York Mets historic ineptitude by asking "Can't anybody here play this game?"  The same can be asked of the Brownback administration's knowledge of health policy and the ACA.