Kentucky's health exchange, kynect, is reporting strong gains in new health insurance enrollees since Thanksgiving.
The Governor's office released statistics late Friday showing that Kynect added 24,140 Kentuckians to a list of the newly ensured. About 5,400 of those were added in the last week.
According to kynect's website, the total number of Kentuckians who have enrolled in a new health insurance plan is 84,422.
Although kynect has been heralded as a national model for its functional website compared to its technically challenged federal equivalent, some 280,000 insured Kentuckians will still have to upgrade their existing "bare bones" health plans to accommodate higher insurance policy standards mandated by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
President Obama announced he would grant extensions for those with noncompliant plans to upgrade their plans by 2015.
Here's a comprehensive list of miscellaneous Kynect statistics released by the Governor's office:
622,149 unique visitors viewing nearly 18.7 million web pages. Thatβs an increase of more than 48,000 new website visitors in just over a week.
481,703 people conducted preliminary screenings to determine qualifications for subsidies, discounts or programs like Medicaid β nearly 28,000 new screenings.
84,422 enrolled in new health coverage, including Medicaid and private insurance β a 17 percent increase over last week.
64,471 have enrolled in Medicaid.
20,951 have enrolled in a qualified health plan β an additional 5,433 over last week, which is a 35 percent jump in private health insurance enrollments.
40 percent of the enrollees in Medicaid or qualified health plans are under 35 years old.
32,453 have been found eligible for a subsidy to purchase a qualified health plan, but most have not yet chosen a plan.
6,248 have enrolled in dental plans.
1,164 small businesses have started applications for employee coverage; 475 of those businesses have completed applications and are eligible to offer coverage to employees.
More than 230,000 calls processed by the kynect call center
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