Georgia's Failed Medicaid Experiment
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https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-medicaid-work-requirement-pathways-to-coverage-hurdles
Georgia is among the states that refused to expand Medicaid using the Affordable Care Act. Instead, Georgia tried to set up its own Medicaid expansion plan with a program it named "Pathway." Essentially it comes with stringent work requirements -- enrollees are expected to provide paperwork to prove that they work every month.
After two years of delay, it got started, now we see the results 18 months after it got started.
Basically it failed the two basic tenets it had going in: enroll eligible people, and verify that they work.
On the enrollment front, the first year target was to enroll 25,000 people (roughly 10% of the state's estimated pool of eligible people), the program managed to enroll about 6,500 -- roughly a quarter of its original first year gold. Lots of complaints about the enrollment website crashing and would be enrollees ending up in voicemails that never get any reply when they try to get help over the phone.
On verifying that the enrollees actually work, well that just did not work and the state now want to step to back to verifying employment only upon enrollment and upon annual renewal.
And of the $87 million Georgia spent on it so far, three quarters of it went to consultants. Deloitte alone got $50 million to build the program's website that reportedly keeps crashing and keeps wiping out data already entered.
“If the goal truly is to increase health insurance for low-income Georgians, they are doing it wrong,” said Dr. Harry J. Heiman, a member of a state commission to study comprehensive health coverage and a professor at Georgia State University School of Public Health. “The one thing that Pathways seems to do well is waste taxpayer money on consultants and administrative costs.”
