For Georgia businesses, a healthy workforce is not just a worthy goal; it’s critical to the bottom line.
For Georgia families, access to health care providers matters as much to quality of life as excellent education for their children and reliable transportation to jobs. For Georgia policy makers at the state Capitol, there’s a basic need to balance spending on competing priorities while finding ways to cover the uninsured that are fiscally responsible and sustainable.
That’s where the Georgia Chamber of Commerce’s High-Quality Healthcare Access Task Force comes in. We’re launching a nine-month study to look at the hurdles that stand between Georgians and the health care their families require. At the end of this process, we will offer policy proposals that are unique to Georgia’s needs – and that work within our state’s budget.
Gov. Nathan Deal has said repeatedly he thinks a regular Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act would quickly become too expensive and crowd out other spending needs, but he’s expressed openness to Georgia-specific approaches that are fiscally sustainable. Last week, his office said, “With more flexibility from the federal government, Georgia could provide more and greater coverage to vulnerable populations through innovative solutions.”
We aim to find that innovative solution and attain two overarching goals.
First, the plan would need to significantly increase the number of Georgians who have access to health coverage. This provides families with peace of mind and financial stability in case of catastrophic illness, and it promotes preventative care, which lowers costs in the long run.
Second, the plan must be economically viable. The most brilliant plan in the world won’t help if Georgians find it unaffordable. We’ll need buy-in from every region of the state to pass a landmark bill in the General Assembly.
Access to high-quality health care isn’t just a problem for Georgians without insurance. It affects every person in the state. When the uninsured get sick, they don’t go to their primary care physician or an urgent care clinic where care is provided at lower cost; they go to the provider that can’t turn them away, hospital emergency rooms, where the built-in costs are astronomically higher.
When providers deliver uncompensated care, these costs are shifted to patients with insurance. Since most Georgians are covered by their employers, businesses absorb much of this expense.
All too often, this stresses health care providers to the breaking point. Since 2013, four rural hospitals have closed. In the past week, we learned we’ll lose a fifth when Hutcheson Medical Center in Fort Oglethorpe closes Dec. 4.
Losing providers not only decreases access to care, but drags down the local economy. In 2014, for example, Hutcheson represented 900 jobs and $29 million in payroll for its community. Much of that money will leave Catoosa County and not come back. The effects compound because lack of health care infrastructure will ward off new economic development prospects.
Our study will give great attention to the “coverage gap.” In Georgia, nearly 400,000 people fall into the no-man’s land of health care coverage. They don’t qualify for traditional Medicaid but don’t meet the income threshold needed to get coverage on the federal insurance exchange. In other words, if a Georgian earns $11,770 a year, he can buy subsidized insurance on the exchange. If he makes one dollar less, he doesn’t qualify for any program. It’s a quirk of the system that results in glaringly unfair outcomes.
Closing this gap would go a long way to substantially reduce the scourge of uncompensated care and give a jolt of life to rural providers and safety net institutions such as Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta and Memorial University Medical Center in Savannah. Indirectly, it would also give relief to Georgians who are currently paying for the cost shift with higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs.
One advantage to Georgia’s cautious approach is that we can learn from what’s worked and what hasn’t in other states across the country. Combining these lessons with Georgia’s unique demographic data and budget needs, we can create a proposal for federal review.
A Georgia blueprint for closing the coverage gap would need to thread the needle between protecting the state budget from uncontained costs and pulling down tens of billions in federal health coverage funds to which Georgia is entitled but is currently not receiving.
As federal taxpayers, we’re sending billions of dollars to other states to prop up their health care systems while access to care in Georgia gets ever more difficult.
For our personal health as well as our economic health, it behooves us to find a Georgia way that maximizes our fair share of federal benefits while minimizing Georgia’s long-term costs.
Tim Lowe is a business owner who chairs the Georgia Chamber of Commerce’s Health and Wellness Committee.
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