EDITORIAL – With Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announcing her conditional resignation on Friday, April 11, it presents an opportunity to re-litigate and reevaluate the landmark legislation the Department of Health and Human Services was charged with implementing: the Affordable Care Act (commonly referred to as “Obamacare”). The debates have been confounding, the mixed messaging and attack ads un-ending. Despite the conflicting feelings many may harbor for President Obama or the national Democratic Party for the ACA’s adoption, it’s time to take a step back—for a moment—and take a look at what affordable healthcare means for Georgia.
What’s not in dispute is that the number of uninsured here in Georgia is among the highest in the country. According to a HuffPost report, Georgia ranks fifth in the nation in terms of the number of residents without health insurance. The problem is further exacerbated with more rural hospitals and emergency departments closing. Access to basic preventative healthcare for many rural residents is highly unlikely—to say the least. Even more, Gov. Nathan Deal has refused to expand Medicaid in the state—unilaterally denying Medicare to 650,000 low-income residents, citing cost control as his motivation. Albeit, if a state refuses to implement the ACA’s insurance exchanges or expanded Medicaid program, the residents of that state are entitled to federal coverage. In short, Gov. Deal is merely playing politics with the health of the state’s low-income residents.
As of April 11, the ACA’s aggregate enrollment exceeded 7.5 million individuals across the nation. That’s 7.5 million Americans who previously were left uninsured, which can now have access to basic preventative care and screenings, cheap prescription drugs, regular exams, and extensive in-patient procedures. All of these 7.5 million Americans purchased insurance through the exchange—more specifically, private health insurance plans made available on the federal or state healthcare insurance marketplaces, or via Medicaid expansion.
More specifically to Georgia, according to a White House report, the ACA’s benefits are replete. In the Peach State, 43,500 young adults may stay on their parent’s healthcare plans until the age of 26. Insurance firms can no longer impose a lifetime cap on coverage to all of Georgia’s 5 million residents. Small business tax credits for providing employee healthcare are available to an estimated 123,000 Georgia businesses. Georgia would’ve been granted $14.6 billion to expand Medicaid—to which Gov. Deal ardently refused for the poor in his state. For Georgia’s senior citizens, the ACA closed the Medicare Part D prescription ‘donut hole’. In 2009 alone, 97,800 Medicare beneficiaries reached the donut hole in Georgia. Now, if Georgia’s seniors reach the prescription drug limit, they’ll receive a rebate check for the difference.
The resounding question is the why? Why do state political leaders continue to resist ACA expansion despite Georgia’s dire need for affordable health coverage? The answer is simple: sheer and shameless politics. The Washington Post published a similar thread to the need for rural healthcare. Take Breathitt County, Kentucky, a rural, impoverished stretch of coal country in the eastern part of the state, deep in the heart of Appalachia. In Breathitt County, scores of residents converge on Jackson, the county seat, to sign up for healthcare coverage as part of the Affordable Care Act. The lines teeming with “cashiers from the IGA grocery, clerks from the dollar store, workers from the lock factory, call-center agents, laid-off coal miners, KFC cooks, Chinese green-card holders in town to teach Appalachian students”—in essence, the very people who need health insurance the most.
Ronald Hudson, a resident of Breathitt County, is an assistant director at a convalescent home, and applied for coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Hudson told the enrollment agent that he’s never had health insurance, has five kids, $23,000 in unpaid medical bills, and makes about $14,000 annually, before taxes. Courtney Lively, the enrollment agent, told Hudson he’d qualify for Medicaid as part of the ACA. Hudson quipped back, “Well, thank God…I believe I’m going to be a Democrat.”
And that is Gov. Deal’s fear, along with every other state lawmaker resisting the ACA’s expansion into Georgia. It’s a sad day in American politics when lawmakers employ a campaign of hysteria and misinformation out of the fear that a policy may work, and work well to ensure that the state’s most vulnerable residents will have access to quality healthcare. Democratic Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear is currently the only chief executive in a southern state to expand healthcare coverage through the ACA. Gov. Deal should follow suit and show political courage and work on behalf of all residents of the state for a healthier Georgia.
Lawmakers in Atlanta could learn a lot from their counterparts in Frankfort. The ACA is here to stay. To Gov. Deal: of the 7.5 million insured under the ACA, not all of them are poor, indigent Democrats. The ACA will slowly gain momentum in the court of public opinion—in fact, some reports note that it already has. Opposition to the ACA will go the way of the opposition to the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare, and the like; consigned to the trash heap of history. Noticeably, statements in opposition to the ACA strongly resemble the sentiments of many conservative Democrats to President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs of the 1930s, in response to the Great Depression.
The life and times very different, but the concerns among the opposition resoundingly similar; in the same way the New Deal galvanized a large winning Democratic coalition of conservative southerners, minorities, urban labor, big city political machines, intellectuals, and others—there’s a real potential for the ACA to do the same. Take it from Ronald Hudson and the downtrodden in rural Kentucky, they might become Democrats. If that’s the fear among Republicans, then they should jump on the ACA bandwagon, not continue to resist its implementation. For it would be politically toxic to repeal health insurance for 7.5 million Americans, the Affordable Care Act is here to stay. Its opposition, soon forgotten; no longer found on the evening television commercial break, but a footnote in the annals of American history. It’s time to embrace affordable healthcare, not needless resist it to score short-term political points.
