Nearly a quarter of Kentucky’s population is now covered by Medicaid, thanks in part 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.
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.
Critics question where the money will come from and fear the expansion will take funding from other critical areas like education. Gov.Steve Beshear is confident that won’t happen.
“It’s going to pump about $15.6 billion dollars into Kentucky’s economy over the next eight years and create about 17,000 new jobs," Beshear said. "And as a result of that, that will create the revenue and the tax revenue and all of that that it will take over the long period of time to pay for the expansion.”
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,” Beshear said. “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.”