Expand Medicaid? General Assembly would have to chime in first, says new bill

• Joeff Davis/CL File
• Tamieka Atkins, Atlanta Chapter Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, speaks at a rally outside Grady Memorial Hospital urging Gov. Nathan Deal to expand Medicaid. Doing so would provide much-needed funding for the public medical facility.

For the last few years, the debate over Medicaid expansion in Georgia largely revolved around Gov. Nathan Deal. He alone had the authority to decide whether the state would participate in the program, which would give hundreds of thousands of uninsured men and women access to healthcare.

A new bill - which has the support of House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, and state Rep. Chad Nimmer, R-Blackshear, the governor's floor leader - would change that.

Under House Bill 990, which was introduced Tuesday while much of north Georgia prepared for snow chaos, expanding Medicaid would also require the approval of the state House of Representatives.

In addition to Ralston and Nimmer, two lower chamber heavy hitters, both of whom are Republican, are listed as co-sponsors: Speaker Pro Tem Jan Jones of Milton and Majority Leader Larry O'Neal of Bonair.

The big question about this bill: Why? We reached out to Deal's office last night and asked that question but, obviously, with the winter storm, have not heard back. The AJC's Jim Galloway spoke with Ralson last night who said that it wasn't an attempt to prevent Medicaid expansion if Deal lost re-election in November. Or if a future governor opts to expand Medicaid.

"I'm totally confident that Nathan Deal is going to be re-elected governor. This is simply an opportunity for the Legislature to stake out the issue as policy," Ralston told Galloway. "I have no concern about Republican governor getting elected this year, four years from now, or eight years from now."

Tim Sweeney, director of health-care policy at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, a think tank that's urged Deal to consider Medicaid expansion, told us yesterday afternoon that such a move could limit the amount of time Deal or a future governor could expand Medicaid, should he or she want. The General Assembly meets only 40 days out of the year.

And there's the bigger issue.

"This isn't so much about whether the governor or the House will decide to expand Medicaid," Sweeney said. "It's more about the 500,000 Georgians who will be without healthcare if the program isn't expanded... What we're left with is, what is the alternative? If not expansion, what is Georgia gonna do to address the fact that we have one of the largest uninsured populations of any state in the country?"

We also posed that question to Deal's staff yesterday via email. We'll post their response when we hear back.