Kentucky’s Experiment with Health Care Reform

Kentucky’s attempt to reform health care in the mid-1990s provides a glimpse into what can happen when insurance market reforms are enacted without a requirement that everyone obtain health insurance coverage.

         

It’s not that I like mandates, because I don’t. But without them, the way the insurance reforms are set out in the federal Act, it too will be a catastrophe. There has to be something in place to make reforms workable.”

Vickie Yates Brown, past chair of the Health Law Section of the American Bar Association

What kind of health care reform increases health costs by 100 percent? I didn’t like it, but I bit the bullet and went ahead and bought it.”

Clay Warnick, editor of a weekly newspaper in Warsaw, KY

I think it would have worked, and more states would have done it [had Kentucky coupled insurance reforms with a coverage requirement].”

Mike Hammons, served on the Kentucky Health Policy Board