Georgia Democrats on Thursday said a plan to experiment with the state’s Medicaid program doesn’t go nearly far enough in helping thousands of poor uninsured Georgians.
Instead, they argue, Gov. Nathan Deal needs to fully expand the program as called for by the Affordable Care Act.
“This is a deeply imperfect option,” said state Sen. Vincent Fort, the chamber’s No. 2 Democrat. “There’s still 650,000 people without health care coverage. This is going to fall short on that.”
State leaders are considering asking the federal government for more Medicaid dollars to help Georgia’s ailing rural hospitals and its large safety net hospitals that lose hundreds of millions of dollars each year caring for the uninsured.
Expansion supporters see the move to obtain what’s known as a Section 1115 waiver from the feds as a sign that the Peach State may be moving closer to fully expanding Medicaid as other red states have done in the past year. However, Deal insisted on Thursday that’s not the case.
Deal and other Georgia conservative leaders have long rejected the expansion idea as too costly and stand firmly opposed. The government health care program currently covers 1.8 million poor children, pregnant women, the elderly and the disabled. Expansion would extend health coverage to an estimated 600,000 poor Georgians, most of them adults with no kids.
Meanwhile, a growing number of Republican-led states are pursuing conservative-friendly Medicaid expansion options using the Section 1115 waivers. The federal waivers give states special permission to experiment with new ways to pay for and provide health care for poor Americans.
Deal said the waiver would “explore the possibilities of covering people who are now uninsured.”
But the details of what the waiver may ask for are murky so far.
Ideally, it will explore better ways of managing the care of patients who suffer from chronic diseases, such as hypertension, diabetes and congestive heart failure, said John Haupert, CEO of Grady Memorial Hospital, the state’s largest safety net hospital.
There needs to be a focus on reducing the cost of and improving the quality of care, Haupert said. The Section 1115 waiver is a first step in addressing the issue of uninsured patients, he said. (Georgia has the second highest rate of uninsured citizens in the nation, behind only Texas.)
If the small pilot projects are successful, then they may be expanded elsewhere throughout the state, Haupert said.
Grady loses more than $200 million each year caring for uninsured patients. But this is a far bigger issue than Grady, Haupert said. Dozens of rural hospitals are struggling to remain financially viable, threatening access to health care for thousands of Georgians.
“If the governor is adamantly opposed to…full blown expansion,” he said, “I’d rather see us take incremental steps than nothing at all.”
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