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How Did The Aca Affect Health Insurance Coverage In Kentucky?, Aaron Yelowitz

Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise Working Papers

The major components of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) were implemented in 2014, including the rollout of the Health Insurance Marketplace, Medicaid expansions, and the individual mandate. Kentucky stands out as one of the few southern states to expand Medicaid, and earlier work has demonstrated that Kentucky experienced some of the largest gains in health insurance coverage. The goal of the current study is to further explore the sources that individuals used to gain coverage in Kentucky using a large, publicly available dataset, the American Community Survey (ACS). Several findings emerge. First, overall health insurance coverage increased by 5.7 percentage …