In June 2015, Kentucky had the fourth lowest labor force participation rate – 57.5 percent – of any state in the country. 

Between July 2013 and May 2015, Kentucky’s Medicaid and KCHIP roles increased faster than any other state in the country, 85.57 percent. During the same time period, Kentucky’s labor force participation rate fell by more than any other state (1.9 percent). States that did not expand Medicaid with the Affordable Health Care Act saw an average increase in their labor force participation rate of 0.04 percent during this same time frame.

Kentucky has 212,021 more jobless adults than it had in 2007. That number is greater than 10 percent of the entire Kentucky labor force. It represents a massive decline in employment rates.

For every 100 Kentucky adults, 4.1 fewer have a job in 2015 than did in 2007, which helps explain why median Kentucky household incomes are more than $3,300 a year lower now than eight years ago.

Apparently, Medicaid expansion has freed members of Kentucky’s low income households from the burden of having to work – an outcome predicted by the Congressional Budget Office. In fact, Vice President Joe Biden explicitly stated this as a benefit of Obamacare: People would have greater freedom to quit working.

One man’s freedom from work, however, can only be purchased by confiscating another woman’s work product. This is the double-edged problem with transfer payments. As they increase, you reduce work from both the transferee (who has less need to work) and the transferor (who now benefits less from the work they do).

Medicaid expansion and higher minimum wages were what progressives wanted, but they brought with them less work and lower median household incomes.

Brian Strow

Bowling Green