As a physician who witnessed the negative effects of Obamacare first-hand, I became frustrated watching former Governor Steve Beshear, D-Ky., use a national platform to push the falsehood that Obamacare has been successful in Kentucky. Frankly, I see things much better than I hear them. Kentucky’s healthcare reality is much different than Beshear’s imaginative narrative.
Beshear spoke about the success of Kynect. It’s true that Kynect had a better rollout than healthcare.gov, but based on how much taxpayer money was spent developing the duplicative system, it should have. Healthcare.gov cost $850 million to build and implement, and enrolled about 9 million people in qualified health plans—less than $100 per enrollee. Kynect, on the other hand, cost about $300 million to build and implement, and enrolled about 85,000 people in qualified health plans—a cost of more than $3,500 per enrollee! Kentucky spent nearly $3,400 more per enrollee for a duplicative website, a tremendous waste of taxpayer resources. Current Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, was smart to shutter this expensive state run system.
Beshear failed to mention the disastrous Kentucky insurance co-op, which despite being subsidized $150 million by taxpayers, collapsed due to poor management and unrealistic rates. The collapse destabilized the market and has resulted in millions of unreimbursed losses by Kentucky providers. But that didn’t stop more than $100,000 in bonuses from being paid to senior management, including $50,000 to the co-op CEO, a former Beshear Cabinet secretary.
Beshear also discussed the drop in Kentucky’s uninsured rate. Simply looking at the uninsured rate without additional context is misleading. The number of people enrolled in private health insurance is approximately the same as it was prior to Obamacare. What occurred was a growth of 68 percent in the state’s Medicaid population, which is neither sustainable, nor does it demonstrate any meaningful improvement in population health metrics.
Beshear expanded Medicaid without a plan to pay for it, leaving a fiscal time bomb for Bevin and the state legislature to defuse. Despite the billions in spending, Kentucky continues to have some of the worst health outcomes in the country. One in three Kentuckians are obese, we are second-worst in the nation for smoking rates, worst for cancer deaths, and worst for most preventable hospitalizations. The only ones truly benefitting from Kentucky’s Obamacare experiment are the managed care organizations who, under Beshear’s watch, received more in managed care profits than any other state in the union.
Simply having insurance does not equate to better health outcomes. Obamacare has done nothing to drive better utilization or health outcomes in Kentucky. Clearly, Obamacare is not the right cure for the future of America’s sick healthcare system.
Dr. Ralph Alvarado was elected state senator for Kentucky’s 28th district in 2014, becoming the first Latino of any party to be elected to the Kentucky General Assembly. The son of a Costa Rican father and an Argentinian mother, Alvarado practices medicine at St. Joseph’s East Hospital in Lexington, Ky.
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