The chief fallout from killing Kynect

Articles about the plans of Kentucky's new Republican governor, Matt Bevin, to junk Kynect, the state's home-grown ACA exchange, and switch to Healthcare.gov don't always make it entirely clearly where the loss or risk lies.

There's the waste of some $290 million in federal grant money used to build Kynect, and  $23 million in one-time expenses that the outgoing Beshear administration estimated it would cost to move to the federal exchange. But since the choice of website does not in itself threaten the Medicaid expansion or change private plan offerings (though it may bump up prices, since HealthCare.gov charges insurers a higher assessment than Kynect has), wherein lies the operational damage?

ACA signups: Why is bronze more popular in blue states?

It's good news that more than three quarters of those who bought private health insurance plans on the ACA exchanges selected silver-level plans.  Most of those who qualified for help with premiums also qualified for subsidies reducing deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs.Those subsidies, dubbed Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) were only available with silver plans.

According to a May 1 HHS issue brief, in the federal marketplace (healthcare.gov), only 15% of buyers eligible for any kind of subsidy bought bronze plans, which have lower monthly premiums but higher deductibles and cost-sharing and render a buyer ineligible for CSR.  Presumably an even lower percentage of those eligible for CSR bought bronze -- again, good news.

The percentage of bronze buyers varies considerably by state, however. Just 5% of subsidy-eligible Pennsylvania buyers selected bronze, while in Washington state, 36% did (Washington breaks out buyers' choices by income level).*  Overall, 25% of buyers in the state marketplaces selected bronze, versus 20% in the federal marketplace.  The outliers in the high-bronze column are all states that ran their own marketplaces.**

Those states are blue-to-purple;they're the ones where state government tried to make the ACA work. How did they end up with higher concentrations of bronze buyers?