From an NYT editorial:
Kentucky’s Bizarre Attack on Health Reform
Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky is dismantling the state’s highly successful exchange on which people buy private health insurance policies or enroll in Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. His shortsighted and pointless show of defiance against the Obama administration’s health care reforms could harm thousands of people in Kentucky, who may fall between the cracks as the state shifts their coverage from its own exchange, known as Kynect, to the federally run exchange at HealthCare.gov.-RW
The editorial tries to put the difficulty of transferring from the state program to the federal program on Bevin when it is a exchange coverage problem at the federal level. The editorial does admit to the gaps of enrollment criteria between the private programs on the federal website and Medicaid which said gaps cause people to not be covered and admits to a cumbersome electronic information exchange. But to solve these admitted problems the NYT says that Bevin is the one who must actually provide a smooth exchange of information and provide enough assistants to help. How is Bevin in charge of fixing the insurance coverage problem at the federal level?
ReplyDeleteObviously the editorial does not mention that the move was made to save Kentucky money and to get Kentucky out of the insurance business. The editorial also does not mention how the federal exchange will actually cost the people even more money. To be fair, there is a link within the editorial to a previous story that briefly mentions more of these details.
One of the big items around this move by Bevin is how much pain does the federal government cause Kentucky over the $290 million originally given to build a website exchange.
What is the total federal money spent to build the federal exhcange website and all of the state exchange websites? These numbers are adding up. I have seen numbers in articles that show over $5 billion.
Agreed, all cutbacks in government are cutbacks in violently imposed systems. That's always beneficial, regardless of visible consequences.
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