HARLAN, Ky. — Gov. Matt Bevin skillfully worked the room at the old courthouse building here in Harlan, one more town-hall meeting in the long campaign toward next year’s election. He deplored the parlous state of a half-mile stretch of U.S. 421 and said $802,000 would be spent to rebuild it. He commiserated with the man who wanted to know how he should deal with the bears tearing through his trash bins, now that it’s forbidden to shoot them.

The line that got the governor a standing ovation, however, was about Medicaid. More precisely, about his plan — so far frustrated by the courts — to require thousands of able-bodied Medicaid recipients between 19 and 64 to work, get training or perform community service for 20 hours a week to keep their health insurance.

“Yeahs” rippled across the room as the governor extolled the value and dignity of work, which propelled him from a hardscrabble youth in rural New Hampshire to the governor’s mansion in Frankfort. “People tell me it’s too much to ask,” he noted, incredulously, about his plan to demand that people on Medicaid get a job. “Baloney.”

And the line from Ronald Reagan got chuckles all around: “The worst thing you can hear,” the governor told Harlan’s gathered residents, is “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”