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Anthony DeHart
North Carolina Health and Human Services Secretary Kody Kinsley was the guest on this week’s edition of “Carolina Newsmakers” with Don Curtis, where he discussed the rollout of expanded Medicaid in North Carolina. Kinsley says North Carolina has moved faster than other states who expanded eligibility with federal funds.
“We are moving at twice the rate that they were moving,” Kinsley said. “And as of this week… [we have] about 390,000 people enrolled.”
Kinsley said the goal was to add 600,000 people to the state’s Medicaid program, and they are making progress quickly.
“We’re not even four months in,” he said, “and we’re already nearly three-quarters of the way to our goal.”
Kinsley points to technology as a key factor in expediting the signup process.
“That goal, by the way, that 600,000 was supposed to take us two years to get there,” Kinsley said. “So we’re doing great work. And it is because we have had these great investments in our technology; a quarter of the people who are applying are never having to talk to a person, it’s going straight through our technology.”
Kinsley also lauded the benefits of Medicaid expansion, such as reducing the burden on emergency rooms and lowering the overall cost of care through preventative medicine.
“When people get sick, you know, if they’ve ignored their high blood pressure long enough, they end up with a major cardiovascular event like a stroke or something else and you end up in the emergency department,” Kinsley said. “That emergency department has to provide them care because we all believe that they should. If the emergency room can’t get reimbursed, what do they do? They drive up the cost for everybody else.”
Listen to the latest episodes of “Carolina Newsmakers” with Don Curtis here.