Make no mistake about it: the Lexington Herald-Leader is wholly in the bag for Governor Andy Beshear, the Democrat who ordered churches closed and imposed every restriction of which he could think during the COVID-19 panicdemic — no, that’s not a typographical error, but exactly how I saw things — endorsed him in 2019 and again in 2023, after having seen his unconstitutional acts of 2020, and attempts to retain authority to continue them. So, when what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal publishes an article like this, you know some bad stuff has happened.

Andy Beshear set out to make drug treatment widely available in Kentucky. Fraud and abuse followed

By Alex Acquisto and Taylor Six | Thursday, July 30, 2026 | 5:00 AM EDT

By the end of 2020, Kentucky’s newly elected Gov. Andy Beshear had one goal above all others: Keep people alive. The state was battling two merciless threats. COVID-19 was killing hundreds of people each month, and deadly drug overdoses were among the highest in the nation. Calling addiction a disease that breeds in isolation, Beshear worried people would stop seeking treatment for fear of contracting COVID-19.

You can already see the attempt to puff up our dictatorial Governor. Oh, he’s just so nice, trying to keep people alive. Of course, by the end of 2020, Kentuckians had made their feelings clear, as the voters turned a significant Republican majority in the General Assembly to an overwhelming one. Subsequent elections have only solidified the GOP’s advantages.

But the Governor did get the Karens to whine to the police about people partying despite the dictatorial restrictions!

So Beshear set out to make drug treatment easier to access. Kentucky joined more than 40 other states in lifting some restrictions on Medicaid, which served most of the Kentuckians enrolled in substance abuse programs: Recovery centers were allowed to offer expensive treatment to clients without seeking approval from state Medicaid insurers.

By 2023, as the pandemic waned, other states restored Medicaid requirements that treatment centers gain prior approval before providing addiction treatment. Kentucky stayed the course. That year, providers offered more than 1,100 spots for people seeking long-term treatment that allows them to live in a facility, a state record and more slots per capita than any other state.

But as the Medicaid bills for all that treatment started piling up, so did the warnings.

Did the Governor heed the warnings? No, of course not!

Almost all those warnings came true.

In a February 2025 meeting about soaring Medicaid costs, Kentucky Medicaid Commissioner Lisa Lee said the previous year’s spending on behavioral health and addiction treatment had reached an unprecedented $2.3 billion. Stuart Owen, who works for a Kentucky Medicaid insurer, told a state advisory committee months earlier that much of that spending was driven by the drug treatment industry, including “unscrupulous providers who are exploiting the heck out of that for money.”

The payout was especially lucrative for one company, Addiction Recovery Care. ARC was Kentucky’s largest drug treatment provider and the largest recipient of state funds between 2019 and 2025. This spring, the Lexington Herald-Leader, in partnership with ProPublica, reported on how ARC exploited Kentucky’s loosened spending controls and may have falsified billing.

How did the purported 2028 Democratic presidential candidate respond? He claimed that drug deaths have declined and he’ll happily take the credit for that. But the article continued to note that such deaths have decreased nationwide, including in states which reimposed the Medicaid restrictions, and those which never loosened them in the first place.

You can read the rest here, as a gift article, if you are blocked by a paywall at the link embedded in the title. I cannot republish more without it being plagiarism. But I will add one more important quote:

By 2025, Republicans had seen enough and passed a bill requiring treatment centers to seek approval from insurers before providing treatment services. Beshear vetoed the bill, saying it “will put up barriers to and delay healthcare for Kentuckians.” Republicans overrode the veto, citing waste, fraud and abuse.

That was after years of warnings.

Mr Beshear has not faced the same national media scrutiny as Governor Tim Walz, the incompetent Democrat from Minnesota, picked by Kamala Harris Emhoff as her running mate, due in large part to the Democratic policy of picking someone dumber than presidential candidate. “Tampon Tim” has brought more scrutiny upon himself and his state by fraud even more egregious than in the Bluegrass State, in large part due to investigations not by the credentialed media but independent investigations by people who were seeking deliberately to undermine Democrats. This time it’s an investigation by the credentialed media.

Will that kill the White House ambitions of our dictatorially-minded Governor? Well, only the Lord can know at this point in time. I doubt that he could win the nomination, and might be hoping to be picked as a vice presidential running mate, but even if that happened, the Democrats will not carry the Bluegrass State.