"Georgia's healthcare system is getting squeezed, and with Washington's dysfunction and gridlock, the state must act." From the Georgia Chamber of Commerce's 2016 Quality Healthcare Access Study.
It’s been a full year since the state’s business leaders concisely put Georgia’s ongoing health care woes in perspective. Despite wishful thinking – and multiple elections – the problems have not lessened and Obamacare remains in full force and effect.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Georgians suffer the physical suffering of inadequate access to even basic health care, and the state’s rural health care infrastructure remains critically ill as well.
This even as the vaudeville act of Washington politics continues to offer up only drama and pratfalls – not solutions for a deadly serious national problem.
Georgia needs to cease waiting on D.C. to provide a politically palatable fix for the rickety assemblage that is the American Way of healthcare. State lawmakers should make good next year on long-voiced hints that they would act to improve Georgia’s house of health care.
It’s hard to imagine an effective solution that does not involve either expanding Medicaid eligibility in Georgia or, alternately, pursuing a waiver to increase access by other means, as some other conservative states have done. Either method would take advantage of the Affordable Care Act’s offering of federal dollars to cover at least 90 percent of expansion’s cost.
A blog post last week by The Brookings Institute notes that “participating states, on the other hand, experienced significant benefits from expanding Medicaid coverage, including soaring enrollment, better health outcomes, and reduced medical debt among recipients.” If those are not worthwhile goals, Georgia’s taxpayers and its suffering sick should ask why not.
In a June 2016 column on this page, State Sen. Renee Unterman, R-Buford, chair of the state Senate health and human services committee, wrote that, “We must use limited state resources wisely in areas of highest need, first and foremost health services, especially those that could reduce health status disparities statewide. Every Georgian is paying for these disparities through increased health insurance premiums and inflated hospital costs.”
She’s right, especially in that we’re all paying – inefficiently – for a substandard status quo. By finally stepping up, Georgia should be able to get improved health care results for dollars spent.
As we wrote in an August 2015 editorial: “The states that have shown enough boldness and political courage to act have seen notable improvements in the statistics that count. In the first six months after Arkansas found a way to cover more of its uninsured, the state saw a 46.5 percent drop in hospital admissions of uninsured patients and a 35.5 percent decline in uninsured emergency room visits.”
Arkansas successfully used a federal waiver allowing it to use public dollars to buy private insurance for the Medicaid-eligible.
Such innovation has brought better health to states bold enough to enact some form of Medicaid expansion.
It’s time for Georgia to stop waiting on D.C. and do the same.
About the Author
