Mississippi’s Republican Governor Phil Bryant tried to blame the Affordable Care Act as the reason his state is the only one in which the number of people without health insurance has gone up since the Affordable Care Act was judged constitutional in 2012. Fascinating, since Governor Bryant is one of the many Republicans who have refused to expand Medicaid in their states as the law had expected them to do.

Here’s what he said:

“If statistics show that the ill-conceived and so-called Affordable Care Act is resulting in higher rates of uninsured people in Mississippi, I’d say that’s yet another example of a broken promise from Barack Obama,” Bryant said.

Only three Southern states participated in the Medicaid expansion — Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia. All three experienced some of the biggest drops in the percentage of uninsured residents — 10.74 percent in West Virginia, 8.35 percent in Kentucky and 7.1 percent in Arkansas.

An estimated 137,800 people in Mississippi were left uncovered by health insurance because the state did not expand Medicaid.

Personally, I think Governor Bryant and his fellow Republicans in the state legislature in Jackson are oblivious. They don’t care what happens to poor people in their state (and Mississippi certainly has a lot of poor people) as long as the elites of the state continue to live high on the hog.

They’re despicable, really. This is not public service as most of us define it. This is a power game played to benefit themselves and their cronies.