It is fashionable in some quarters to pretend that elections don't matter and that voting doesn't matter because the two parties are basically mirror images of each other.
That's nonsense.
Arkansas, for example, is a deeply red state that voted for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama by a 24-point margin. However, its outgoing governor, Democrat Mike Beebe, negotiated deals with the Obama administration and with the Arkansas Legislature to expand Medicaid in that state through private insurance companies. I'm not sure that approach will deliver the efficiencies that they seek, but if it does, it becomes a model that other states could emulate. And at the very least, it provided political cover for a program that now provides health coverage to more than 200,000 previously uninsured Arkansas residents. The rate of uninsured in the state has fallen from 22.5 percent to 12.4 percent, the steepest drop in the nation as measured by Gallup.
And for Arkansas hospitals struggling to keep their doors open, it has been a godsend. According to data collected by the Arkansas Hospital Association, emergency room visits by the uninsured have dropped 35.5 percent for the first six months of 2014. Hospital admissions for the uninsured have dropped 46.5 percent. "Also, fears that the private option would make care so easily accessible that overcrowding in hospital emergency rooms would rise to unprecedented levels have not materialized," an AHA study found. "Total visits to emergency rooms increased less than 2 percent between the six-month spans in 2013 and 2014.... AHA reports that is an indication that more patients began avoiding emergency rooms as a point of entry into the health care system and instead are seeking care in more appropriate settings such as physician offices and hospital outpatient clinics."
As AHA CEO Bo Ryall puts it, "The survey now indicates that the private option is reducing uncompensated care significantly. We can safely say that the private option has saved many rural Arkansas hospitals from buckling under their growing uncompensated care burdens."
As we all know, Gov. Nathan Deal chose a different course, refusing to even consider expanding Medicaid to some 500,000 eligible Georgians on the grounds that we can't afford it. (Arkansas can afford it; Georgia cannot. That alone tells you something.) And this morning, the good folks of Columbus awoke to news of the consequences of such a decision:
The move by Columbus' largest health care provider, which owns the Midtown Medical Center, Northside Medical Center and the John B. Amos Cancer Center among other entities, comes as the company is facing declining reimbursement and growing bad debt expenses...."
The good news is that Columbus Regional won't be closing its doors, even though it has lost money in each of the last three years. Unlike many rural Georgia hospitals, it still has enough insured patients to keep it in operation. Other Georgia hospitals face a more dire situation; some have closed, and others will do so in the next few years. Communities will suffer, jobs will disappear, lives will be lost.
At times, politics can seem like a game, a glorified version of college football pitting one team against the other. But it has consequences.
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