Georgia Democrats are attempting to encourage voters on well being care after a spate of hospital closures, GOP insurance policies limiting Medicaid, abortion restrictions and rising medical prices. However even dependable Democratic voters with urgent medical wants are nonetheless grappling with financial worries, elevating questions on how far well being care points can go in turning out the bottom or in driving independents and nonvoters towards Democrats.
Shortly earlier than Atlanta Medical Middle within the downtown-adjacent Previous Fourth Ward neighborhood closed for good final week, June Barlow Callaway realized {that a} CT scan carried out there had detected most cancers in her throat. Callaway had labored for the 460-bed hospital’s food-service contractor for 22 years, however after getting her analysis in October, she concluded it was time to “sit down.”
“Being 73, no one goes to rent me,” Callaway says. “My physique simply received’t take this push and pulling no extra.”
Inside weeks, she began chemotherapy — at Grady Memorial, now considered one of two remaining hospitals in downtown Atlanta — stocked her pantry with objects from an area meals financial institution and filed for unemployment.
Callaway is among the many greater than 2 million Georgians who’ve voted early. She selected Democrats down the poll, as she has most of her life, partially as a result of Sen. Raphael Warnock and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams have campaigned on reducing well being care prices, she says. However even for her, well being issues aren’t essentially high of thoughts.
Atlanta’s 11.7% inflation price in August was second solely to Phoenix’s, the most recent obtainable knowledge present, and much above the present 8.2% nationwide common. Callaway’s payments for her Medicare-covered most cancers remedies don’t evaluate along with her $856 mortgage funds, or the electrical energy invoice that swelled to round $300 from $200 in recent times, or the cable bundle she ditched this summer season.
Callaway, who doesn’t have kids, just lately moved a cousin into her four-bedroom residence to assist her cowl bills. She’s contemplating taking up a second roommate however worries about residing with somebody she doesn’t know.
“I may need to resort to that, however I hope not,” she says. “We’re reducing again on the whole lot.”
Whereas voters could also be tightening their budgets for a lot of causes, the prominence of financial pressures is making it more durable for Democratic candidates throughout the nation to provoke supporters over different points.
In an October Quinnipiac ballot of seemingly Georgia voters, 43% ranked inflation as their high situation, with abortion (14%), election legal guidelines (11%) and gun violence (10%) trailing far behind. The outcomes have been even starker alongside get together strains: 73% of state Republicans ranked inflation primary — with no different situation cracking double digits — whereas 27% of Democrats put abortion first and simply 12% prioritized well being care. (The ballot’s margin of error was +/- 2.9 proportion factors.)
The Warnock and Abrams campaigns are racing to maneuver the needle. Each have highlighted insurance policies that restrict well being care entry in Georgia, reminiscent of its new six-week abortion ban and a call by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who’s working for re-election, to say no further federal funds to increase Medicaid, this system that gives well being protection to low-income Individuals.
In an ad final month, Abrams drove 85 miles from Atlanta Medical Middle to Macon, residence of the closest Stage 1 trauma middle ought to Grady Memorial replenish — a distance she stated risked the lives of Atlantans needing emergency care. Quite than settle for some $15 billion in congressional pandemic help that will have benefited Medicaid sufferers, Abrams stated, Kemp “has squandered that cash by refusing to deliver it to Georgia.”
The Kemp marketing campaign didn’t reply to a request for remark. The governor’s partial Medicaid growth — focusing on some 50,000 individuals — just lately cleared a authorized hurdle after the Biden administration objected to its work and job-training necessities. Kemp, who has campaigned primarily on the economic system, additionally used federal Covid help for money funds to low-income residents, distributing greater than $1 billion to greater than 3 million individuals.
Georgians have witnessed well being companies dwindle earlier than and through the pandemic, straining the state’s medical system whilst regional well being care prices rise.
In September, in accordance with the most recent knowledge obtainable from the Labor Division, medical companies price almost 6% extra throughout the South than a 12 months in the past. Almost half of Georgia’s 159 counties haven’t any OB-GYN, in accordance with the Georgia Board of Well being Care Workforce. And whereas roughly a 3rd of rural hospitals within the U.S. are vulnerable to shutdown, Georgia has skilled extra closures of rural critical-access hospitals over the previous decade than some other state, in accordance with researchers on the College of North Carolina.
That development has just lately hit Georgia’s capital. Atlanta Medical Middle, run by the personal nonprofit Wellstar Well being System, was considered one of solely two Stage 1 trauma facilities in a metropolis that has added greater than 65,000 residents up to now 12 months alone. At the very least 15 major and specialty care places of work related to AMC are closing their Atlanta areas as nicely.
Wellstar stated in a press release that it has spent years investing “considerably in capital enhancements like medical tools and constructing renovations” regardless of extended working losses that grew to become untenable. “AMC has lengthy cared for essentially the most weak sufferers in our metropolis with out the general public monetary help offered to native security internet hospitals, and with out this crucial further funding, we simply couldn’t maintain operations.”
State Democrats have sought to tie the shutdowns to restricted Medicaid entry, with Warnock pointing to his file in Congress the place he “capped the price of insulin and prescribed drugs for Georgia seniors, fought to increase Medicaid and labored to decrease well being care prices,” his marketing campaign stated in a press release.
Georgia’s 13.7% uninsured price was the third highest within the nation in 2019, in accordance with U.S. census knowledge, and the speed for rural residents is anticipated to surpass 25% by 2026. In 2018, the Kaiser Household Basis estimated that just about 500,000 uninsured grownup Georgians would have been eligible for Medicaid had the state expanded this system.
Warnock’s GOP opponent, Herschel Walker, has criticized Medicaid and says he desires individuals “to get off the federal government well being care.” The Walker marketing campaign didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Wellstar has stated that treating extra Medicaid sufferers would have helped forestall its Atlanta closures however not stopped them. Even so, it isn’t clear the problem is firing up voters.
“Medicaid growth will not be related to your day-to-day residing in Georgia,” stated Fred Hicks, a political strategist who labored on Warnock’s 2020 marketing campaign. “It’s too amorphous for individuals, and Democrats have simply achieved a very unhealthy job of messaging on that.”
Different political specialists say Medicaid issues might gas Democratic turnout, even marginally, together with different points. “It’d get some individuals to go and vote who hadn’t deliberate to vote,” says Charles Bullock, a political science professor on the College of Georgia. In a extremely polarized purple state, “pretty small actions on completely different points might show decisive,” he stated.
Like Abrams, some Atlanta group leaders are betting that the hospital closures will resonate, particularly within the closely Democratic metro Atlanta space. Michael Stinson, pastor of East Level First Mallalieu United Methodist Church, says he and different church leaders have mentioned the shutdowns in sermons. And so they’re planning a senior well being seminar on Nov. 5, days earlier than polls shut.
“I’m certain the truth that there’s no hospitals South of I-20 goes to be a part of that dialog,” he stated, referring to a serious east-west hall in central Atlanta.
A former doctor himself, Stinson, 64, just lately realized that the physician who manages his bronchial asthma and hypertension is leaving the Wellstar household medication workplace he visits, cautious of being swamped by sufferers spilling over from closed-down websites.
That features AMC South in East Level — residence to Stinson’s church and quarter-hour exterior Atlanta correct — which Wellstar shuttered a number of months earlier than ceasing operations at AMC downtown. East Level consists largely of Black and brown residents. Simply six months after opening an pressing care clinic instead of AMC South, Wellstar final week introduced its closure, too.
Some see the shutdowns as exacerbating racial disparities in well being care entry in Atlanta, the place a 2018 Trulia evaluation discovered 25.3 well being care suppliers per 10,000 residents within the metropolis’s majority-white census tracts, in contrast with 9.8 in majority-Black tracts.
“Relying on the place you reside in Atlanta, you could possibly stay to be 60 or you could possibly stay to be 80,” says Atlanta metropolis council member Liliana Bakhtiari, an impartial whose district consists of components of Previous Fourth Ward. “[Wellstar] purchased 5 hospitals. Two of them have been in low-income, majority-minority areas that wanted much more assist. And so they closed these two down and stored three in North Fulton open, the place it’s extra prosperous and predominantly white.”
Wellstar rejected this characterization, saying it “made substantial investments in every facility, together with AMC and AMC South,” with almost $350 million in enhancements to the previous. “Wellstar has all the time and can proceed to serve low-income and minority communities throughout the area. We’re the most important supplier of uncompensated care in Georgia, offering greater than $915 million in charity care final 12 months,” it stated.
For now, June Callaway is driving to her oncology appointments at Grady, about 7 miles from AMC South, which she used to stroll to. The journeys require her to pay for gasoline and parking. And whereas she’s grateful Medicare covers most of her payments, she’s nonetheless listening for an answer that not one of the main candidates, Democrat or Republican, appear to have readily at hand. “I’m any person that’s going to be for the group,” she says, “that’s going to assist us with the well being care — deliver it nearer to us.”
