What can you say, except congratulations?
Gov. Nathan Deal, Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens, Attorney General Sam Olens and the Georgia Legislature have approached the implementation of Obamacare with one overriding goal: Deny access to health-care coverage to as many uninsured Georgians as possible.
In fact, it was a year ago this month that Hudgens made it explicit:
“Let me tell you what we’re doing (about Obamacare),” he bragged to a crowd of fellow Republicans: “Everything in our power to be an obstructionist.”
Their effort has been wildly successful. In fact, if our leaders had been half as successful at, say, improving education, growing the economy or solving transportation as they have been at denying health coverage to their own citizens, Georgia would be in high cotton instead of in long-term decline relative to the rest of the country.
This week, we got a peek at the true scale of their success with the release of state-by-state data compiled by Gallup. The numbers tell us that a year ago, before implementation of Obamacare, Georgia had the nation’s 7th highest rate of citizens without health insurance.
Today, we have the 3rd highest rate of uninsured. Well done, gentlemen.
However, their success really comes into focus when we compare Georgia’s performance to that of Arkansas and Kentucky. Both are red states; both are considerably poorer than Georgia. Nonetheless, leaders of those states approached Obamacare not as an opportunity for ideological preening, but as an opportunity to help their own people. They agreed to expand Medicaid to cover their lower-income workers; Georgia refused. They set up their own state exchanges; Georgia refused, and instead threw up obstacles to the functioning of the federal alternative.
Here’s what happened:
— Arkansas cut its uninsured rate from 22.5 percent — the second highest in the country — down to 12.4 percent, the 29th highest. That’s a drop of 10.1 percentage points.
— Kentucky cut its uninsured rate from 20.4 percent — the 10th highest — to 11.9 percent, the 33rd highest. That’s a drop of 8.5 percentage points.
— Georgia cut its uninsured rate from 21.4 percent to 20.2 percent, a drop of 1.2 percentage points.
Of course, those are mere numbers. They don’t reflect the human beings behind them. But if you do the math, it tells us that if Georgia had pursued the course taken by Arkansas and Kentucky, some 730,000 to 900,000 more of our fellow citizens today would have access to health insurance that many of us take for granted.
Arkansas and Kentucky are enjoying other benefits as well. As Arkansas Surgeon General Joe Thompson told his state Legislature, emergency room visits are down in Arkansas, the number of uninsured people seeking care in emergency rooms is down 24 percent, and the number of uninsured being hospitalized is down 30 percent.
“On all three of these indicators, we’re going in the right direction to improve the fiscal stability and well-being of our hospitals,” Thompson said. “But more importantly we’re removing a financial burden for individuals who have needed care.”
So again, congratulations to Georgia’s leaders for avoiding all that. I hope they’re proud of themselves.
