How Kentucky Built The Country's Best Obamacare Website

Kentucky did it right. The state's online health insurance marketplace has become Obamacare's city on a hill while the federal HealthCare.gov has been flummoxed by a month of glitches and bad press. Whatever the federal website seems to have failed to do to ensure its success on the Oct. 1 launch, Kentucky did.

Kentucky, with its deeply conservative congressional delegation, might seem like an unlikely place for Obamacare to find success. But Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear saw the law -- and a state-built marketplace -- as an opportunity to help put the state on a path to greater health.

His state routinely ranks toward the bottom in overall health, and better health coverage is one step toward reversing that norm, he said.

"For us to make a transformational difference, we needed to do something game-changing." Beshear told TPM in an interview. "The (Affordable Care Act) provided us a tool to do that. It's succeeded so far beyond our wildest dreams."
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From a design standpoint, Kentucky made the conscious choice to stick to the basics, rather than seeking to blow users away with a state-of-the-art consumer interface. A big part of that was knowing their demographics: A simpler site would make it easer to access for people without broadband Internet access, and the content was written at a sixth-grade reading level so it would be as easy to understand as possible.
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