But a funny thing happened on the way to the governor's office: Bevin's anti-Obamacare rhetoric started to tone down as Election Day approached. And in the months since he's been chief executive of Kentucky,instead of ripping up Obamacare out of his state, Bevin is making alterations to how the law works there and leaving its core elements and benefits in place.
Not much to say about the bluegrass state...taken together, the 6 carriers offering individual policies in Kentucky appear to be requesting an average rate hike of 23.8%, ranging from Aetna's single-digits for a few hundred people up to Golden Rule's stroke-inducing 65% hike. One thing to note is that KY's total individual market was around 163,000 people in 2015, and is likely around 25% higher today (around 203,000), so over half of the market is likely missing from this table:
I wrote a lot about Matt Bevin during the Kentucky gubernatorial campaign last fall, as well as after he won the election, was sworn in as governor, and started doing his best to screw up stuff which wasn't broken. As you'll recall, when it came to the Affordable Care Act and the state ACA exchange (kynect), Bevin originally promised that he was going to kill the kynect exchange completely (even though there's no reason to do so, it's been operating smoothly for years and has excellent branding in the state) as well as killing the ACA Medicaid expansion (even though, again, it's been a huge success in the state at no cost to them so far and only pennies on the dollar going forward).
Hmmm...OK, I guess "as of today" means I need to make the "thru date" 2/04/16 instead of 1/31 or 2/01, but whatever; the point is that this is Kentucky's final official total.
Kynect's total was 81,121 as of 12/26, so they only added about 12,500 more since Christmas. 93,687 is only around 75% of the 125K I was expecting, and is over 12,600 fewer private enrollees than they had last year, making them one of only 8 states to drop their open enrollment total.
OK, there's a lot of confusion (including some by myself) about the whole "saving money" issue with regard to Matt Bevin shutting down Kentucky's kynect exchange. I've discussed it with Louise Norris, and I think the situation is as follows:
Currently, kynect's $28 million annual budget is covered by a 1% fee charged to all premiums for everyone on individual policies (on or off exchange), small group policies and large group policies.
Kentucky has roughly 4.4 million people. Of these, around 9% are still uninsured, 27% are on Medicaid (much of this thanks to ACA expansion!) and at least 18% are on Medicare (800K as of 2012, more today). That means that no more than 46% of the state's population is currently paying this 1% fee; it's likely around 40% doing so.
In other words, right now, as far as I can tell, around 1.8 million Kentuckians are paying roughly $16 per year to pay for Kynect.
FRANKFORT, Ky. - Following through on a campaign pledge, Gov. Matt Bevin has notified federal authorities he plans to dismantle kynect, Kentucky's health insurance exchange created as part of the Affordable Care Act.
In a Dec. 30 letter to Sylvia Burwell, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Bevin said he plans to wind down the state health exchange and transition Kentuckians to the federal site, healthcare.gov, to shop for insurance under the law also known as Obamacare.
If you look at the State-By-State OE3 enrollment breakdown, you'll notice that there are still 4 blank fields all the way down at the bottom, plus a special note regarding California:
When ass-half Matt Bevin was running for Kentucky Governor, he campaigned explicitly on wiping out the state's expansion of Medicaid to over 400,000 Kentuckians under the Affordable Care Act.
As election day actually approached, he began kind of, sort of walking this pledge back, making vague references to possibly shifting to some form of "waiver" version of Medicaid expansion, along the lines of several other states. These vary from fairly mild (small co-pays/nominal premium payments, as we have here in Michigan) to extremely confusing/complicated, as they have in Indiana:
"Sometimes I park in handicapped spaces
While handicapped people make handicapped faces." --Denis Leary, "Asshole"
A couple of weeks ago I noted that newly inaugurated Republican Governor of Kentucky Matt Bevin was, true to his word during the campaign, making the destruction of kynect, the Bluegrass State's ACA healthcare exchange, one of his first and highest priorities.
Never mind that the exchange has (unlike most of the other ACA exchange sites) operated pretty much flawlessly since day one.
Never mind that thanks to the ACA and kynect, the uninsured rate in Kentucky has been slashed by more than half over the past two years, from over 20% down to 9%.
Never mind that the "kynect" branding has been an unprecedented and award-winning success.
