Cumberland area groups help facilitate health care access

On December 8, KFTC members in the newly formed Cumberland chapter (Knox, Pulaski, Laurel and Whitley counties) and representatives from the Kentucky Primary Care Association hosted a Facebook livestream event to promote healthcare.gov, the federal health care exchange under the Affordable Care Act.

The majority of the advertising budget for healthcare.gov has been cut this year, leaving a lot of people believing it no longer exists. Alongside two application assisters from KPCA, Kathy Oller and Carol Adkins, and the KPCA Coordinator of Community Development and Outreach, Whitney Allen, we had a goal to encourage Kentuckians to utilize healthcare.gov before the sign-up deadline on December 15.

We gave a presentation on how to create an account on healthcare.gov along with a quick walk-through of the application process. We also made general information available, such as the income levels needed to quality for health insurance and Medicaid, family sizes, and contact information for the KPCA application assisters.

To conclude the event we had a question and answer segment in which we invited people to call in or post online any questions they had about signing up for healthcare. In addition, we discussed some frequently asked questions that the application assisters provided.

We decided to take an alternative approach and make the event digital in hope to reach out to more people who wouldn’t be able to attend a physical event.

Our goal was to make this process less overwhelming for people by showing them that it can be fairly simple. This proved to be successful because the stream was viewed more than 500 times.

I was very proud to be a part of this event!