Cutting the Cord After Cashing In: Senator Meredith’s Medicaid Hypocrisy

When Steve Meredith tells you to “take a deep breath,” he’s hoping you’ll forget to ask who lit the fire in the first place.

The state senator from Leitchfield recently posted a long-winded defense of the legislature’s Medicaid budget cuts, painting himself as the sober-minded voice of reason in a storm of “fearmongering.” But if you know Steve Meredith’s past; not just his politics, but his career, then you know exactly why his reassurances ring hollow.

Because long before he was calling Medicaid unsustainable, he was profiting from it.

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From Hospital Exec to Political Opportunist.

Before his election to the Kentucky Senate in 2016, Meredith ran a rural hospital system. Instead of being remembered as a bold reformer, he left a legacy of overworked nurses, underpaid staff, and a toxic culture that prioritized the bottom line over patient care. “Cutting the fat” in his world meant laying off frontline workers and slashing benefits while preserving bloated executive perks.

And while staff were stretched thin, a surgeon with a track record of botched procedures was allowed to keep operating. Literally. Lawsuits poured in, millions were paid out, and the damage to patients and the local community was irreversible. But Meredith didn’t bear the brunt. He cashed out and walked away, selling off the hospital and padding his bank account on the way out the door.

That money? A big chunk of it came from federal Medicaid reimbursements. The very funds he now calls wasteful and unsustainable.

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Crying Foul After Feeding at the Trough.

Today, Senator Meredith is trying to position himself as the guy who’s going to “fix” Medicaid. But the truth is, he built his wealth with both hands deep in the system. He benefited from Medicaid expansion, federal matching dollars, and rural healthcare programs to fund his own operations, and now wants to gut those same programs under the pretense of fiscal responsibility.

He says Medicaid “will bankrupt our state” while ignoring the real drivers of waste and inefficiency: hospital consolidation, underinvestment in preventive care, and corporate profiteering. All issues he contributed to. All issues he now pretends don’t exist.

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Rural Healthcare Is in Crisis. And It’s Not Manufactured.

Meredith dismisses the warnings about rural hospitals closing as “fearmongering.” That’s not just insulting. It’s dangerous.

Hospitals are closing across the country. Not because of scare tactics, but because of shrinking reimbursements, staffing shortages, and legislative neglect. In Kentucky, rural hospitals are often the largest employer in the county and the only accessible point of care for miles. To downplay the risk of closure is to ignore the people whose lives depend on these facilities every single day.

And while Meredith smugly assures us that “no one will let that happen,” he’s done very little to actually stop it. Committees don’t keep hospitals open. Medicaid funding does.

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What we’re seeing isn’t good governance. It’s political theater. Meredith and his colleagues have created the very crisis they now claim they’re here to solve. They call it reform. We call it sabotage.

We can’t take advice from someone who spent years bleeding a rural hospital dry and now wants to rewrite the rules for everyone else. We can’t trust a man who says Medicaid is bloated while quietly cashing the checks it once wrote him.

So no, Senator Meredith. We’re not taking a deep breath. We’re speaking up.

Because rural healthcare is worth fighting for.

Because Medicaid saves lives.

Because the only thing worse than cutting care is being lectured on responsibility by someone who never practiced it.

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