(The Center Square) — Georgia Democrats want the state to advance a full Medicaid expansion, pronouncing a plan Gov. Brian Kemp championed has been a failure.
The Center Square reported solely in August that not up to 300 folks have enrolled within the new Georgia Pathways to Coverage program as of Aug. 17.
The program introduced on July 1 and offers Medicaid to Georgians between 19 and 64 years previous with a family source of revenue as much as the federal poverty degree and who meet the qualifying actions threshold however don’t seem to be eligible for normal Medicaid.
“Pathways doesn’t cover enough Georgians, and those that it does cover, it takes too long to get it done,” Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler, D-Stone Mountain, mentioned in a press release. “This is a failure of leadership, and it is a failure of governance.”
Butler mentioned lawmakers can finish what she known as a “failed experiment” by means of passing Senate Bill 24 to extend Medicaid and canopy as much as 500,000 folks. A spokesperson for the Democratic Party of Georgia didn’t reply to a request in quest of extra information at the imaginable price of an expansion.
“Think of all the hospitals that could still be open, the jobs we could have created, and the loved ones we could have saved had we just expanded Medicaid years ago,” Butler added.
A Georgia Department of Community Health spokesperson didn’t right away reply to a request to verify up to date enrollment numbers. However, studies point out not up to 1,500 folks have enrolled within the Georgia Pathways program.
A spokesman for Kemp, a Republican, didn’t reply to a request for remark.
However, in his State of the State, Kemp mentioned the state negotiated with the government at the program however blamed President Joe Biden’s management for delaying its release for greater than a yr. At the time, the governor indicated more or less 345,000 Georgians may just qualify for this system, regardless that officers in August mentioned the estimated adoption charge would succeed in round 90,000 to 100,000 by means of 2025.
“From the beginning of my administration, we have made expanding access to affordable health care a top priority and despite the noise from naysayers, we’ve made significant strides over the years through a multi-pronged approach that includes Georgia Access and several new laws related to healthcare access,” Kemp mentioned in a release this month pronouncing this system won the 2023 National Spotlight Award from the National Association of Medicaid Directors.
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