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Equality, Rights & Justice Issues

How long do you want to live? How long will you live?

There’s a 25 year life expectancy difference across neighborhoods in Georgia. In Georgia, the neighborhood with the shortest life expectancy is just five miles south of Macon, Ga. With a poverty rate over fifty percent, the life expectancy is just over 63 years. However, Vinings, a suburb northwest of Atlanta, has a poverty rate under 5 percent, and a life expectancy of over 87 years. Where you live impacts the quality of education your children

Healthcare

Local health care suffers under lack of state leadership

Real access to healthcare is an achievable goal, but when politicians weathering the legislative session in Atlanta play politics with people’s health, communities are left scrambling to do their best in a broken system. The state needs to do more to make it possible for small, rural hospitals to stay open, and for people living in the state’s rural and small town communities to access the healthcare they need. Lee and Dougherty Counties in southwest

Healthcare

Poverty is confusing to the Ga. Chamber of Commerce

Last week, the Georgia Chamber of Commerce released their policy alternatives to expanding Medicaid, but unfortunately, their proposed solutions all show a lack of understanding of what living in poverty means. The Chamber’s policy proposals, not surprisingly, include an emphasis on “personal responsibility,” in calling for the folks who are in the Medicaid coverage gap — mostly very low-income, childless adults — to be required to share costs of co-pays and deductibles. Their proposals also represent ongoing

Healthcare

New federal funding means it’s time to expand Medicaid in Georgia

Georgia Republicans decided not to expand Medicaid under the pretense that Georgia couldn’t afford it. However, with the increase in federal funding for states adopting the next round of expanded Medicaid, Georgia can’t afford not to adopt it. The Macon Telegraph editorialized, “When Gov. Nathan Deal first declared the state wouldn’t participate in the ACA in 2012, it didn’t seem to make much sense. The federal government paid 100 percent of the cost of the

Healthcare

Louisiana expands Medicaid, will GA keep saying no?

Georgia’s efforts to block Medicaid expansion just got a little bit harder, following the successful expansion of Medicaid in Louisiana this summer. Conservative leadership in this state has cited cost and concerns that the federal government will back out of its commitment to fund 90 percent of the cost of Medicaid expansion. This would, the argument goes, leave states to either cancel what is proving to be a wildly popular policy — healthcare for all — or pay

Healthcare

Healthcare for all, a dream for Georgia

Half a million Georgians would gain health insurance coverage if this state expanded Medicaid in 2017. That makes up about 10 percent of the nation’s uninsured, ranking just behind Texas and Florida. Expanding Medicaid, however hard a battle it’s been, is just the beginning in the fight to make sure ALL people have meaningful access to health care (and not just health insurance). Georgia has too few health care providers — especially primary care doctors,