Arlington, Georgia — Nine years after the hospital closed in Arlington, Georgia, there are lingering health concerns. Health insurance premiums are high, many residents report poor health, and Calhoun County’s only ambulance is taking patients to distant hospitals, with no guarantee of immediate arrival.
“If you’re on a call, you’re better off just throwing it in the truck and trying to get somewhere,” said resident Sam Robinson.
With a population of 1,209, Arlington reflects rural Georgia’s healthcare challenges.
Democrats, including governor-nominated Stacey Abrams, have made these issues clear when running for election this year, with Georgia joining 38 other states to launch Medicaid for all healthy adults. We are calling for expanding our health insurance program.
Abrams launched a campaign to oust Republican Brian Kemp from a closed hospital in nearby Cuthbert, highlighting the core issue of her small loss to Kemp in 2018.
“I’m talking about someone who was tested and told they had stage 1 pancreatic cancer,” Abrams told reporters at a video press conference earlier this month. You have no right to be visited.”
Experts predict that more than 450,000 uninsured Georgians could be covered if Medicaid were expanded. Many people are typically ineligible for subsidies to purchase individual policies, leading to what experts call a “coverage gap.”
The expansion of Medicaid has also been an issue elsewhere this year.
In South Dakota, voters are set to decide a referendum on expansion, opposed by Republican Governor Christy Noem. In Kansas and Wisconsin, Democratic governors are seeking re-election after failing to persuade Republican legislatures to expand electoral coverage.
In Georgia, Kemp rejected calls for expansion, instead proposing to cover a small group of people who meet work, education, or volunteer requirements. In a letter to , Kemp called the full expansion of Medicaid a “failed one-size-fits-all” policy.
But that refusal hits Arlington, once home to the 25-bed Calhoun Memorial Hospital. Decades had passed since babies were born at the Calhoun Memorial, and the facility was struggling to keep up with the latest technology. Services were limited, but locals relied on them in an emergency.
“I used the emergency room with my son,” said Pam Conner. “He was about 4 years old when he got his first bee sting. It put him into anaphylaxis. I don’t know what would have happened without the hospital.”
Nine years after the facility closed and laid off 99 employees, Connor is chairman of the county hospital’s board of directors. With so many uninsured patients, Connor said he was providing more than $2 million a year in uncompensated care when the hospital closed.
The county rented a new roof in 2008, but it hurts locally that taxpayers still owe nearly $500,000 on the building, which is now being rented to a drug and alcohol rehab facility. By the way. Local authorities have refused to raise property taxes to cover hospital deficits, unlike some counties in Georgia. The hospital has sold nursing homes to raise money, but its long-term financial prospects have dimmed. Finally, authorities decided to close, joining her eight other regional hospitals in Georgia since 2008.
Arlington residents now rely on one county ambulance in Morgan, 12 miles away. Calhoun County expects him to spend $537,000 this year to provide emergency medical services. That’s more than one-eighth of the $4.2 million budget.
However, healthcare problems are acute in Southwest Georgia. Private health insurance is so expensive that Connor, whose family owns an insurance agency, buys insurance through the federal health insurance marketplace instead. Robinson said he and his wife once paid $1,000 a month in premiums together.
Kemp succeeded in lowering insurance rates and encouraged more insurance companies to use subsidies to provide coverage outside the Atlanta metropolitan area. But insurance premiums remain high in southwest Georgia, where one large hospital in Albany dominates the market, and residents often have poor health. Diabetes, obesity and fertility among young people are on the rise. Black residents are much more likely to have preventable hospitalizations.
Sherrell Byrd of SOWEGA Rising, which seeks to improve welfare in southwestern Georgia, said COVID-19 has highlighted the region’s poor health and precarious health system. In early 2020, southwestern Georgia, one of the regions with the highest mortality rate from respiratory viruses, received national attention.
“It’s become clear how bad our health is,” Byrd said. “There were so many complications here.”
Medicaid is also flaring up as an issue in Atlanta, where the WellStar system has closed a hospital in suburban East Point and plans to close its 532-bed Atlanta Medical Center by November 1st. This makes him one of only five top level trauma centers in Georgia. WellStar says the expansion of Medicaid didn’t help because Atlanta Medical Center was losing so much money, but Democrats continue to argue that it may have worked in the long run.
Having states provide Medicaid coverage for residents with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty line was envisioned in President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care reform. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that the federal government cannot compel states to act, and many Republican-led states resisted.
President Joe Biden’s administration has been trying to block Kemp’s plans for a partial expansion of Medicaid, but a judge in August ruled that Georgia could proceed with the working requirements. , calls his approach “a much better approach to expanding health coverage than ‘full-on’ Medicaid expansion.”
Kemp says the expansion of Medicaid will force some people who are currently covered by private health insurance subsidies to enroll in Medicaid. With Georgia setting Medicaid payments low and some doctors not taking Medicaid, Kemp said that while current Medicaid patients face increased competition to find doctors, those people’s They claim it will make the situation worse.
The governor also points out that 600,000 Georgians are on Medicaid now than when he took office, essentially arguing that Medicaid expansion is already happening. Many people are covered because the government prohibits states from excluding people from Medicaid during the COVID-19 pandemic. They may be removed once the federal public health emergency is over.
Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock tried to spoil the deal last year by luring lawmakers to raise federal funding from 90% to 95% for the first two years of the new state’s Medicaid expansion. did. Warnock is seeking his Nov. 8 re-election and has long sought wider coverage. Before he became a senator, he was arrested in 2014 at the Georgia State Capitol and in 2017 at the US Capitol during protests over the issue.
“Unfortunately, the state has left that money on the table, leaving hundreds of thousands of working Georgians in the compensation gap,” Warnock said Oct. 12 in Atlanta. “And I will continue to fight for them.”
Warnock’s opponent, Republican Herschel Walker, said last month that he would oppose the expansion.
“Medicaid is not good right now,” he told reporters. “Right now, expansion is going to keep bankrupting us. Everyone knows it.”
A key issue underlying the debate is the extent to which governments are obliged to provide health care and seek improvements in health conditions. Democrats now widely believe that health care is a human right and a collective responsibility. Many Republicans still believe it was an individual responsibility.
Conner says it was a mismatch that really existed in Arlington. Hospitals are required by law to provide emergency care, but payment is not guaranteed.
“Universal health care may actually be a citizen’s right,” says Conner. But the hospital has no right to get the money to pay for it. ”
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