"Kentucky Republican Matt Bevin ran for governor on a platform devoted almost exclusively to killing Obamacare, including its expansion of Medicaid insurance to the poor. He didn’t do it. Following in the steps of eight Republican governors who sought to expand Medicaid without appearing to do so, he applied for federal permission to add Republican-friendly tweaks to the program instead.
The decision was a nod to reality. By the time Bevin took office at the beginning of 2016, almost one in three Kentuckians had Medicaid or insurance through a federally subsidized Affordable Care Act plan. Many of them didn’t know it when they elected the new anti-Obamacare governor, a side effect of how Kentucky marketed the plans.
State Branding
Kentucky pushed Obamacare as anything but Obamacare in order to sidestep political hostility to the president, whose position on coal made him unpopular in a state with roughly half the coal jobs it had in 2010. Enrollees signed up for Kynect, the state’s brand of the health-law insurance, not Obamacare. Medicaid recipients enrolled through managed-care companies that handle the program, including Louisville, Kentucky-based Passport Health Plan.
“A lot of people, they just know they have insurance but they don’t know it’s Obamacare,” said Amber Lewis, 34, who sells guns, Kennedy half dollars, baseball cards and knives every day at a booth at the Bull Creek Trade Center in Prestonburg, Kentucky.
“They say they have Kynect insurance, or Passport insurance, I hear it both ways,” said Lewis, who has insurance for the first time, pays nothing for it and knows what it is. “I know what I have. I have Obamacare.”"
Fonte: Margaret Newkirk, Bloomberg
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