About Joanne Kenen
Contributing editor to Politico Magazine and former health care editor-at-large, Politico, Commonwealth Fund journalist in residence and assistant lecturer at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Kentucky has gotten a lot of attention for the largely unexpected success of its health insurance exchange.
The Washington Post’s Stephanie McCrummen has looked at another aspect of the Kentucky story: Who is getting covered and what is that going to mean?
Her first feature was published Nov. 23 (when most of us were focused on the final week of the “tech surge” to fix HealthCare.gov). She followed up in February. McCrummen looked at the faces behind the numbers – and asked questions about the numbers.
Her stories took her to Breathitt County in the foothills of Appalachia, one of the poorest and unhealthiest counties in the U.S with high rates of diabetes and heart disease. She focused on Courtney Lively, who is a human link between being covered and not being covered. Lively works at a clinic near a fast food joint, helping people get coverage, some for the first time. Among those walking through her office door were “cashiers from the IGA grocery, clerks from the dollar store, workers from the lock factory, call-center agents, laid-off coal miners, KFC cooks, Chinese green-card holders in town to teach Appalachian students.”
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Contributing editor to Politico Magazine and former health care editor-at-large, Politico, Commonwealth Fund journalist in residence and assistant lecturer at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.