Kentucky: ACA-enabled Medicaid expansion estimated at 320K + 43K woodworkers

Hat Tip To: 
Joe Sonka

The last time I updated the Kentucky numbers, all I had to go on was a rough number of around 450,000 people enrolled via Kynect, without any breakdown between private QHPs and Medicaid enrollees. At the time, I took the official 4/19 numbers and then assumed a 90/10 Medicaid/QHP split for the additions since then. This gave me an estimated breakdown of around 87K QHPs & 363K Medicaid.

Today, while there's no updated numbers provided, Joe Sonka over at LEO Weekly brings a hard breakdown of how the 4/19 Medicaid numbers break out:

Larry Kissner, the commissioner of Kentucky’s Department of Medicaid Services, told a legislative committee in Frankfort last week that Kentucky’s decision to expand Medicaid not only dramatically increased the number of insured Kentuckians taking advantage of preventative screenings, but also the amount of Medicaid reimbursements received by health care providers, particularly hospitals.

One piece of new information revealed was the number of people who signed up for Medicaid through Kynect by the April deadline who are part of the state’s new Medicaid expansion: 290,000, which makes up 88 percent of the 330,000 total, meaning only roughly 40,000 were previously eligible for Medicaid and signed up through the so-called “woodwork effect.”

Assuming that my 90/10 split estimate is correct for enrollments since the middle of April, and assuming that the split between "strict expansion" and "woodworker" enrollees has also remained around 88/12, that means that Kentucky should have enrolled roughly 320,000 of those eligible for expansion, plus another 43,000 "woodworkers" in the program.

 

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