Please tell us how you, your family or your community has benefited from Medicaid coverage for dental care, vision care, and transportation assistance: Proper dental care is important for more than just teeth. Good oral hygiene affects bacteria levels throughout your body, and has been shown to impact cardiac health as well. When I moved to Kentucky, I believe I was told that Kentucky ranked near the bottom of states in terms of dental care and overall health. Likewise, vision care is essential, not only so that people can SEE properly to do their jobs, take care of their families, etc., but regular vision care can also catch other health problems like high blood pressure. I see no reason why these benefits should be eliminated when they are trying to help people live their best lives, even if that life is among the poorest citizens of our state.

Please tell us how eliminating these benefits would affect you, your family, or your community: If the Governor believes that people should be working, how can he expect them to work without access to affordable dental and vision care? Keeping people from these services will also affect the types of jobs they can apply for to support their families. A lack of transportation for many Kentuckians who live in areas where bus service is lacking degrades their ability to receive care and for those who are parenting young children and unable to receive these benefits, how will the children grow into healthy adults, ready to take on the world. We have to get over this me-first attitude that has developed in this country and look out for each other.