According to the article “Poll: One Quarter of Kentuckians Have No Health Insurance” by Renee Shaw on PublicNewsService.org, Kentucky health insurance has some major opportunities.  With nearly 1/4 of the Kentucky residents going without health insurance, we see improvements from previous years but they still have a ways to go.

The Kentucky Health Issues Poll is completed annually and takes a random sample of over 1600 Kentucky adults to gain a snapshot of how many residents under 65 in the state have health insurance Kentucky.  The Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky assisted in the funding of the poll.  The group’s senior program officer, Sarah Walsh, believes the findings are not surprising.  She says the numbers are an improvement over the previous year where 33% were uninsured.  This was during the peak of the recession and numbers are headed in the right direction.

Households with lower incomes have higher rates of being uninsured.  The poll shows that adults ages 18-29 are twice as likely to go without health insurance when compared to people over 45.  In addition to this, more than a third of Kentucky residents under 65 have been without health insurance at some point in the last year.  It’s apparent that too many Kentuckians are going without health insurance and there are too many gaps in coverage.  If a health crisis hits, this can be financially catastrophic for a family and many people simply to not realize this or care not to think about the impact it may have.  Some good news is that with health care reform implementation taking effect in 2014, approximately 261,000 Kentucky residents should benefit from Medicaid expansion under the new federal bill.