Sen. Warnock, new commission explore ways to provide health care coverage to
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A new commission will soon begin examining the health care coverage needs of low-income and uninsured Georgians, kicking off an examination that is expected to delve into whether the state should rethink its long-held resistance to fully expanding Medicaid.
That panel was created earlier this year after some high-ranking Republicans showed a new openness toward expanding health care coverage through an alternative to traditional Medicaid expansion.
But a proposal to expand health care coverage using an Arkansas-style model, which purchases private insurance on the marketplace instead of adding more people to the state-run Medicaid program, was narrowly defeated after emerging late in the session.
The newly created commission was seen as a way to continue that conversation while giving Gov. Brian Kemp’s limited expansion program, Georgia Pathways to Coverage, more time to work.
The nine-member commission is set to hold its first meeting later this month and is tasked with issuing a report to the governor and state lawmakers this December ahead of the 2025 legislative session. The commission is set to dissolve at the end of 2026.
A proposed temporary federal work-around
There is also a new proposal in the works that would create a temporary federal work-around for non-expansion states like Georgia.
A similar concept was floated a couple years ago during negotiations over the Inflation Reduction Act, but that earlier proposal threatened to reduce the federal funding of holdout states.
Georgia, which has one of the highest uninsured rates in the country, is one of 10 states that have not fully expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock announced Thursday that he would introduce a bill called the “Bridge to Medicaid” Act in hopes of building support ahead of the expected push next year to extend the Trump-era tax cuts. U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff is also a sponsor.
The proposal would use tax credits to create a new health care option for the hundreds of thousands of Georgians who are in what is known as the coverage gap, which exists in states that did not fully expand Medicaid.
The program would start in 2026 and last for three years.
“Those tax cuts went by and large to the wealthiest of the wealthy,” Warnock said in an interview. “While we’re having a conversation about tax cuts for people who don’t need them, I think we certainly ought to be talking about how to provide tax incentives that will provide health care to a traveling nurse, a truck driver, somebody who paints houses for a living.
“These are these ordinary people who keep the American economy going, and our failure to do something about these millions of Americans who are in the Medicaid gap means that we have a sicker and weaker workforce,” he said.
If passed, these new tax credits would be like existing subsidies but would be expanded to include more people and would be more generous in that they would apply to copays and deductibles.
The program is similar…
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