Pegasus Institute

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a wave of governors effectively shutting down their respective state economies. Certainly, the United States is in a crisis, one from which we may not see the light of day for weeks, and the economy has almost certainly entered a recession, with millions of Americans losing their jobs as businesses are forced to either cut back or shutter their enterprises. Gov. Andy Beshear has used the broad executive powers given to him by t

West Virginia’s newly implemented (and widely touted) Medicaid pharmaceutical carve-out has caused a buzz about the potential for a similar plan in Kentucky. The solution offered by the policy’s proponents – just cut out the middleman who negotiates pharmaceutical prices and the state’s Medicaid tax bill shrinks – sounds too good to be true, and it is. Kentucky has already tried keeping pharmaceutical care within its Department for Medicaid Services. Before 2011, when Kentuck

The Kentucky General Assembly once again faces a challenging budget session in which projected revenue cannot meet the rising costs of Medicaid, pension obligations, and jail crowding. As we saw during the 2018 legislative session, where the budget faced similar constraints, self-interested observers have begun digging for potential revenue options, usually in the hopes of keeping some other government program or loophole intact. Such attempts virtually never yield good tax p