Is insurance technology the key to health plan enrollment of the “invincible” youth?

Cell Phone Insurance technology

Kentucky is using a mobile app called Kynect to try to reach more young people and encourage them to sign up.

Officials in Kentucky are using insurance technology over mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets in order to try to be able to better reach young people and encourage them to enroll in health plans.

The Kynect smartphone app launched with the insurance exchange in the state on Saturday.

The Kynect mobile app represents some of the latest in insurance technology, in the hopes of appealing to younger demographics in the state, who often prefer to conduct their online activities over smartphones and tablets, as opposed to laptops and desktop computers. The application can be downloaded for iOS based devices at Apple iTunes, and is also available at Google Play for Android device users.

This mobile insurance technology app is available for free download and offers a range of features.

Cell Phone Insurance technologyThough anyone is welcome to use Kynect in the state, the main goal is to reach the demographic known as the “invincibles”, which includes young people who don’t feel that health insurance would provide them with adequate benefit to be worth the premiums, which they don’t feel that they can afford in the first place. That said, it is this younger and healthier category of people in Kentucky that is vital to the financial stability of the efforts from the state to uphold the Affordable Care Act’s requirements.

So far, there have been 521,000 people in Kentucky who have enrolled in a health plan through the insurance exchange. An additional 80,000 people have purchased private coverage. This, according to the state’s own statistics. There have also been 440,000 that have qualified for the taxpayer funded Medicaid program in the state, for which eligibility is based on household income.

The precise figure required of privately paying consumers in order to have the state’s program balance financially has not been released. That said, a previous prediction has suggested that before the health care reform was implemented, there had been about 640,000 people in Kentucky who were uninsured. Now, the hope is that this insurance technology will push the figures in the direction that is needed to include the “invincibles” into those with coverage.

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