Kentucky, Oregon revive little-used provision of ACA to assist lower-income residents
‘Congress … is broken, and states are having to compensate for that,” said one official.
Leaders of two states with wildly different politics agree on at least one thing: Expanding an Obama-era Affordable Care Act policy will make health care more affordable for low-income residents of their states.
According to Politico, “Oregon and Kentucky … are pursuing an Obama-era policy that uses federal dollars to establish a health insurance plan for people who make too much money to qualify for their state’s Medicaid programs. The goal is to provide residents who find Obamacare plans too expensive a less costly option, while smoothing insurance gaps for people teetering on the edge of Medicaid eligibility.”
Related: Biden administration proposes fix for ACA’s ‘family glitch’
Oregon Democrats passed a bill last month to establish the program and created a task to oversee the details. Meanwhile, Kentucky Republicans passed $4.5 million in state funding to set up the program; Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, signed it into law.
Politico reports that “an estimated 85,000 Oregonians and at least 37,000 Kentuckians will be eligible to enroll in the plans as soon as next year.”
The moves suggest that at least some states do not expect the Biden Administration to deliver on its promise to expand health care.
“Because the federal government has failed in so many ways to provide access to health care for Americans, Oregon is stepping in,” Jonathan Frochtzwajg, public policy and grants manager at the Cascade AIDS Project and one of the members of Oregon’s task force, told Politico. “Congress, and in particular the Senate, is broken, and states are having to compensate for that.”
“Kentucky is not known for our great health metrics, and we’re doing our best to really address some of the gaps and the barriers in the system,” added Kentucky Rep. Kim Moser, a Republican who chairs the House Health and Family Services Committee and a registered nurse. “We know that this is the group of people who churn in and out of health coverage.”
The program both states have invoked is known as the basic health program and was included in the Affordable Care Act. But only Minnesota and New York took advantage of it, according to Politico. Given the current state of health care affairs, though, other states could follow. A West Virginia Republican reportedly is working on a bill similar to the ones in Kentucky and Oregon.
“We were a little bit surprised, if you go back to the early days of the Affordable Care Act, that only one other state set up a basic health plan right off the bat,” Chuck Johnson, deputy commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Human Services, told Politico. “For us, it was kind of a no-brainer.”