Officers on Monday arrested 10 protesters, including state Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta, who refused to leave Gov. Nathan Deal’s office in a protest over Medicaid expansion in Georgia.
Police charged the 10 with obstruction and criminal trespassing. They were taken to Fulton County Jail.
The arrests were orchestrated as part of Moral Monday Georgia, a group that has modeled its political protests after weekly demonstrations that rocked North Carolina last year and led to hundreds of arrests each week. Georgia organizers count support from a number of different groups, and they advocate progressive policies at sharp odds with the state’s conservative Republican leadership.
The protests at the Capitol started on the first day of the legislative session Jan. 13, but Monday’s arrests were the first as part of the demonstrations.
Expanding Medicaid would extend health coverage to an additional 650,000 low-income Georgians. Deal has said the state can’t afford to expand a program that’s already overtaxed and too costly. Twenty-two other states have also rejected Medicaid expansion, while half the states and the District of Columbia are moving forward with it.
Deal has estimated the expansion would cost the state $4 billion over a decade, but supporters of the health care law say the cost would likely be closer to half of that. They also say Georgia can’t afford to turn away more than $30 billion over that same time period in new federal dollars that would flood into the state if it expanded the health program.
The governor and other opponents of the law have questioned whether the debt-ridden federal government will be able to hold up its end of the deal. Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government pays for the full cost of newly eligible Medicaid recipients under expansion for the first three years. Its share then drops to no lower than 90 percent of the cost.
Senate Democrats, including Fort, filed Senate Bill 295 last week in an effort to force Georgia to expand its Medicaid program, although it’s not likely to go anywhere under the Republican-led Legislature.
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