Nearly a quarter of Kentucky’s population is now covered by Medicaid, thanks largely to the state’s embrace of the Affordable Care Act.
While fully funded by the federal government for the first three years, the state will have to start bearing a small share of the burden in 2017. Governor Steve Beshear maintains an expansion was the right thing to do.
"A match starts kicking in and it works its way up to a 90\10 match," explains Beshear. "The feds in the end will be paying 90 percent of the cost and the state picks up 10 percent. That's a lot better than the current Medicaid program which is 80\20."
The Cabinet for Health and Family Services will issue a report in a few weeks,which is expected to re-ignite the debate whether the state should have expanded its Medicaid rolls and how the state will pay for the new enrollees. According to the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, the state’s Medicaid rolls have increased from more than 843,000 people in 2013 to 1.1 million last year. Critics worry the expansion will take money from other critical areas like education. Governor Beshear tells WKU Public Radio that he is confident that won't happen.
"It's going to pump about $15.6 billion into Kentucky's economy over the next eight years and create about 17,000 jobs, and as a result, that will create the revenue that it will take to pay for the expansion," Beshear adds.
Anecdotally, Beshear claims that in the past year, 5,000 jobs have been created in the heath care sector and another five or six thousand created in administrative services in support of the health care sector.
