KCRag Forum

[T]he Urban Institute's Health Policy Center has calculated ... figures for the first time, using American Community Survey data from 2009, 2010, and 2011 to grasp, at the metro level, how many people will likely lose out on health coverage in states that have turned their backs on this part of the law. The totals are staggering. In the Dallas/Ft. Forth metropolitan area, 357,000 adults living below the poverty line who would have qualified for Medicaid under the new law won't get it because of Texas' decision not to expand.

Steve Dunn wrote in his email that while the company covers some forms of contraceptives for employees, the drugs that induce abortions by causing miscarriages, referred to as abortifacients, “directly contradicts the religious views of the family owners.”

There are some differences between the Dunn family position that the firm operates according to Catholic moral and religious teachings, as stated in its support for Hobby Lobby, and some church teachings.

For example, Catholic doctrine bans all contraceptives, not just abortion-inducing drugs.

And the Catholic Church supports nuclear disarmament and opposes nuclear weapons. JE Dunn was the general contractor for the new nuclear weapons parts plant that was built for the National Nuclear Security Administration at Missouri 150 and Botts Road.

“JE Dunn has a long history of working with the federal government, including building military facilities,” Steve Dunn wrote. “However, electing to work with the government in that regard is different than complying with a mandate to provide abortifacients.”

phuqueue wrote:Scared to step out of the GOP echo chamber

LenexatoKCMO wrote:

phuqueue wrote:Scared to step out of the GOP echo chamber

Why would the GOPers be upset by a survey indicating people are benefitting from the scheme they designed?

Over the past year, Kentucky’s health care website has proved to be a huge success. More than a half-million Kentucky residents have signed up for the Bluegrass State’s version of Obamacare. A majority of Kentuckians approve of it. That this has happened in a deeply red state is unexpected but hardly an accident.

This is the story of how one state, led by Governor Steven Beshear and a team of smart, determined career civil servants, got it right–by preparing exhaustively, by dealing frontally with the system’s challenges and by celebrating rather than soft-pedaling the reality that Obamacare is a social-welfare program intended to help the poor and the middle class get health care coverage. It’s also a story about how the politics of Obamacare has played out differently in Kentucky compared with much of the rest of the country. Which helps explain why the Affordable Care Act, as put into place elsewhere, may never become as broadly popular as Social Security or Medicare–even if it survives as long as those programs.

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But beyond the numbers, there is a political difference. Obamacare continues to be a loser or at best a toss-up politically across much of the country. In Kentucky–one of the reddest of red states, where Obama lost to Mitt Romney 60% to 38% in 2012 and would surely lose by more today–Obamacare is a winner.

Only it’s not known as Obamacare. It’s called Kynect, the name Beshear smartly gave it in the run-up to the launch.

Polls consistently report that voters in Kentucky approve of Kynect, even if they voice disapproval when asked about Obamacare. Again, Kynect is Obamacare.

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In fact, no one mentioned Obamacare, except for the one enrollee who said that Kynect was “a lot better than Obamacare.”

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Across the country, however, polls continue to show that more people disapprove of Obamacare than approve of it. The difference in Kentucky is not just about a website that functioned well from the start.

Beshear and his team did a smarter job setting expectations and anticipating hurdles. For example, they were unafraid to acknowledge how complicated buying health insurance would be for consumers, let alone consumers buying it for the first time. Rather than tout, as the President did, that logging on to Kynect would be as simple as buying an airplane ticket online, the Kentucky team prepared from the start to guide people through the complicated process of buying insurance, especially for the first time.

They took full advantage of federal funds available to deploy specially trained assistants–those Kynectors, like the ones who helped the Browns–at all enrollment centers to guide consumers through the process. And unlike the federal exchange, they included on their website a tool for people to search for insurance agents who could help them enroll (and be paid by the insurance companies for doing so). In fact, 44% of the Kentucky enrollees on the exchange used an agent.

More important, Beshear’s basic sales pitch was better because, unlike Obama, the Kentucky governor was unafraid to highlight what Obamacare really is: a massive new government income-redistribution program providing health insurance, through subsidies and the expansion of Medicaid, to millions of people, like the Browns, who could not otherwise afford it.

This appears in the August 18, 2014 issue of TIME

KCMax wrote:Obamacare implementation went great and people love it