More than 400,000 Georgians are being denied health insurance by state officials who have barred them from participating in the Medicaid expansion created by Obamacare.
Who are these people?
Consider a family of three children and a single parent. Today, that parent can’t get Medicaid coverage if he or she makes more than $9,000 a year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Nine thousand dollars. Medicaid expansion would raise that to $23,550, allowing that parent and hundreds of thousands of other low-wage working Georgians to get insurance.
They’re the maid who cleans your hotel room; the busboy who clears away your dirty dishes; the aide who cares for your elderly parent or grandparent in the nursing home; the cashier who just settled your bill. They can’t afford coverage on their own, not at that pay, and the jobs they work almost never offer health insurance as a benefit. They live their lives praying they never get sick, never break a limb, never have an accident.
Medicaid expansion is their one and only hope of getting insurance, and the powers that be in Georgia are telling them no.
By saying no, Georgia also says no to billions of dollars in federal money that would come into the state, money that in addition to buying health care would create thousands of jobs and keep hospitals open. The federal government would pay 100 percent of the cost for the first three years of the program. In 2017, it would drop to 95 percent, and gradually decline to 90 percent by 2020, where by law it will remain.
Taxes have already been raised to generate that federal money; Georgians are already paying those taxes. But the benefits are being reaped elsewhere.
According to a Commonwealth Fund study, by 2022 Georgia would be passing up $4.9 billion a year in Medicaid, three times what it will receive that year in federal transportation money. That transportation money would also require matching funds from the state, but state officials aren’t talking about turning down THAT money. Money to pave highways? Sure. Money to buy health care for our working poor? Not interested.
And why? You know why: Politics. To those who run this state, solidarity with Republican antipathy to President Obama and Obamacare is more important than helping their own people. The goal is to kill the program, not cooperate with it.
But that’s simply not going to happen. Nationally, Obamacare enrollment numbers have regained a lot of the ground that was lost in the program’s disastrous rollout. According to health-care experts, the program has now crossed the threshold of viability, meaning it has attracted more than enough customers, and more than enough young, healthy customers, to sustain itself as an insurance market. It’s here to stay, and efforts by Republicans to undercut the program at the state level have lost what little purpose they once may have had.
Unfortunately, sanity shows no sign of reasserting itself. Leaders of the state House of Representatives introduced a bill this week that would strip the governor of the power to approve Medicaid expansion, instead putting that decision in the hands of the Legislature. Given Gov. Nathan Deal’s repeated opposition to expansion, that seems odd.
Maybe legislators fear Deal might waver in that opposition. Maybe they fear a Democrat will take office in January. Or maybe they don’t want the governor having all the fun of denying insurance to hundreds of thousands of low-income Georgians.
