Kentucky: ACA-enabled Medicaid expansion up to 71% - 96% of total eligible!

I debated whether I should bundle this point in with the prior Kentucky post, but decided it was worthy of a separate entry.

As I noted there, Kentucky has now enrolled around 335,000 people in Medicaid via the Kynect ACA exchange; an impressive number.

The thing is, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, only about 350,000 Kentuckians who weren't insured prior to January qualified for Medicaid in the first place (including both woodworkers as well as ACA expansion). This means that theoretically up to 96% of all Kentuckians eligible for Medicaid have now been enrolled!

Now, unlike some states, I don't know for certain how many of those 335K were previously insured; some expansion recipients might have been paying through the nose for insurance last fall and switched over, while others might have simply fallen on hard times in the latter part of 2013. However, as was also noted, 75% of the combined QHP/Medicaid total were previously uninsured...and this 75% figure was true of the Medicaid crowd specifically as of late March.

In other words, out of around 335,000 newly-added Medicaid recipients, at least 251,000 of them can be taken out of that 350K pool...or a minimum of 71%.