Kentucky had one of the largest drops in the rate of uninsured workers in 2014 thanks to the state’s Medicaid expansion, which the state’s Republican governor recently decided to keep in place.
A report from the pro-Obamacare advocacy group Families USA reported that Kentucky’s worker uninsured rate declined by 36 percent from 2013 to 2014, when Obamacare’s exchanges were up and running. The state joined Vermont, Rhode Island and Hawaii as states with the same decline.
“A majority of people who became insured through Medicaid expansion were workers,” said Cara Stewart, health law fellow with the advocacy group Kentucky Equal Justice Center, on a call with reporters.
The report comes a few weeks after new Republican Gov. Matt Bevin decided to keep the expansion in place after running last year on a platform of repealing the expansion. Bevin instead has called for changes to Medicaid, the federal insurance program for the poor.
Overall about 31 states and the District of Columbia have expanded Medicaid and 19 states have not.
Each state saw a decline in the percentage of working uninsured, with the national average hitting 19 percent.
The figures vary among states, with Medicaid expansion states generally experiencing higher percentages. The report only lists states that implemented the expansion in 2014 as “expansion states.”
The state with the smallest decline was Utah, a state that did not expand, with 5 percent. Pennsylvania had a 9-percent decline and South Carolina 10 percent.
Massachusetts also only had a decline of 10 percent. Families USA said that the state already expanded coverage in 2006 so it wasn’t affected as much by implementation of Obamacare and the expansion.
Families USA used data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to glean the results.
