Why You Should Care
Federal and State tax dollars help fund essential health services for families that have been priced out of the market for private health insurance. In Georgia, Medicaid programs known as the Katie Beckett Waiver, MRWP program, PeachCare for Kids and Babies Can’t Wait represent the safety net for Georgians who have no health insurance or not enough health insurance to cover critical services for their special needs children.
Georgia government has recently made drastic changes to these important programs. Essential health care services have been cut. State bureaucracies and their contractors have increased the bureaucratic paperwork that choke access to needed programs. These deterioration affects everyone in the health care system.
Doctor’s offices and other medical providers have to hire extra staff to constantly keep up with the changing Medicaid and PeachCare rules. Their office staffs also spend an inordinate amount of time battling the CMOs to see that good medical claims get paid in a timely manner.
Guess who pays the cost for having to battle government and CMO bureaucracies?
Worse, when the Governor cuts access to these programs more people become uninsured.
According to the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, over 300,000 children are uninsured in Georgia. Of which 75 percent are eligible for PeachCare for Kids or Medicaid coverage but are not enrolled.
When families don’t have health coverage, hospital emergency rooms and urgent care centers become the last resort for desperate parents who only want their child well. These health providers refer to these services provided to people who are uninsured as “uncompensated care.”
Guess who pays the cost for the increasing “uncompensated care” hospitals and other medical centers are having to take on?
