So, yesterday I posted an item about how the ACA has cut Kentucky's uninsured rate by at least 50% since last October. This is significant news, but I also posted similar items about impressive uninsured rate drops in New Jersey (38%), Minnesota (40%) and especially Massachusetts (a good 86% or so, down to nearly zilch). All four posts received various levels of retweets on Twitter. However, the Kentucky one in particular apparently caught the eye of one David Simas, aka the "Assistant to the President and Deputy Senior Advisor for Communications and Strategy."
Since today seems to be "How much has the ACA cut the uninsured rate by in this state/that state?" day, I thought I'd dust off this TPM article from way back on April 1st:
Obamacare has cut Kentucky's uninsured population by more than 40 percent, signing up roughly 360,000 residents since enrollment opened up on Oct. 1, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.
Some 75 percent of them -- 270,000 -- were previously uninsured. That means Kentucky's uninsured population of 640,000 has come down by 42 percent.
At the time, the headline read "Obamacare Cuts Kentucky's Uninsured Rate By 40 Percent", which was impressive enough. However, that was wayyyy back over 2 months ago. A little simple math tells the rest of the story:
Rand Paul has a habit of being just as much of a weasel as his senior counterpart Mitch McConnell on most issues, but occasionally being "refreshingly" honest. Case in point:
FRANKFORT — Saying he favors a full repeal of "Obamacare" but citing a "technical question," U.S. Sen. Rand Paul on Friday gave cover to U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell a week after McConnell said Kynect and the federal law are not connected.
..."There's a lot of questions that are big questions that are beyond just the exchange and the Kynect and things like that," Paul said.
"It's ... how we're going to fund these things."
...When asked a second time if he would want to dismantle Kynect, Paul said: "I would repeal all of Obamacare."
Over the past 7 months, plenty of healthcare reporters, insurance executives and political pundits have started following this site and/or my Twitter feed. For the most part the ones I know of tend to be either of unknown ideology or left-leaning, but there's also a substantial number of Republican, Conservative, Libertarian or other wise right-leaning types, and that's fine.
I've butted heads publicly with a few of these folks. In some cases they've presented honest, intelligent disagreement; in others they've spewed tired, BS talking points. Here's a great opportunity to prove whether you're dealing an intellectually honest hand or not. I present you with the following:
MCCONNELL: KY. EXCHANGE UNCONNECTED TO HEALTH LAW
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) -- Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell says he would try to repeal the Affordable Care Act if he's elected Senate majority leader.
But the veteran senator won't say what would happen to the 413,000 Kentuckians who have health insurance through the state's health care exchange.
McConnell told reporters Friday that the fate of the state exchange is unconnected to the federal health care law. Yet the exchange would not exist, if not for the law that created it.
The article claims that these numbers are "through 3/31", but that's obviously an error, since a previous update directly from Kynect made it clear that the QHP number was several thousand lower than that as of early April. Doesn't really matter, however; these are still outstanding results for Kentucky:
At a Capitol news conference Tuesday, the Democratic governor announced that 413,410 Kentuckians enrolled for health-care coverage through the online insurance marketplace called "Kynect" in its first open-enrollment period, from Oct. 1 through March 31.
...He said about 75 percent of the people signing up for health insurance in Kentucky had no previous insurance and that 330,615 people qualified for Medicaid coverage.
Beshear described it as "deeply satisfying" that 10 percent of the state's population "finally has affordable, quality health insurance that gives them assurance that if they get sick or hurt, they'll get the care and they're not in danger of bankruptcy."
...More than one out of every 10 Kentuckians has health insurance through Kynect, Haynes said.
OK, this just adds to the confusion over the "extension periods"...not only is Kentucky joining the "you have until 4/15 if you started by 3/31" brigade, but it appears that they're also allowing people to start the application/enrollment process between 4/4 - 4/11 as well:
Gov. Steve Beshear announced Tuesday that the state will extend its deadline. People will be able to file for health insurance from April 4 to April 11.
The official deadline had been midnight March 31. Gwenda Bond, spokeswoman for the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, said 21,000 people signed up over the weekend, including 12,000 people who signed up Monday. The deadline affected only those signing up for private health insurance, because those eligible for Medicaid can apply at any time.
Because of the high demand, Bond said, state officials decided to add additional days for enrollment or a "special enrollment period." The days between the March 31 deadline and the special enrollment period will allow for some tweaks to the technical system to allow for the extension, she said.
Huh. Good for them, but if that's the case, why not just bump this out to 4/15 and be done with it? Weird.
OK, the kind folks at KynectKY have helpfully cleared up their final 3/31 numbers:
Kynectky Here is what I have. This is as of 7:00AM 04-01-14.Total QHP Enrollments: 77,044; Total MCO Enrollments: 294,221.
UPDATE: I've been so busy plugging these numbers into the spreadsheet that I haven't had a chance to see what the true impact is...and in Kentucky, it's nothing short of amazing:
Obamacare has cut Kentucky's uninsured population by more than 40 percent, signing up roughly 360,000 residents since enrollment opened up on Oct. 1, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.
Some 75 percent of them -- 270,000 -- were previously uninsured. That means Kentucky's uninsured population of 640,000 has come down by 42 percent.
Wow, a personal response from the KynectKY Facebook Page:
Kynectky Charles Gaba Total QHP Enrollments = 73,080; Total MCO Enrollments = 286,222.
I don't think this is the final 3/31 total, however, since this adds up to 359,302, which was posted as of around 4pm yesterday.
However, they've also just announced another 12K "processed through 8:30am today", so I'm not sure whether those are counted as part of the 3/31 total or not. I'm going to assume that they were entered last night and just took a few hours to actually process fully...therefore they count towards the 3/31 tally (unless they clarify otherwise), using a 20/80 ratio of 2,400 QHPs to 9,600 Medicaid:
