Reed: Medicaid expansion vital to Grady Memorial Hospital

• Joeff Davis/CL File
• OUT OF THE SHADOWS: Grady Memorial Hospital has rebounded from dire straits, but the coast isn’t clear in 2013.

For months, activists have pushed back against Georgia Republicans’ argument that expanding Medicaid in Georgia to the state’s 400,000 uninsured people would be too costly.

Now Mayor Kasim Reed says he will try and convince the state to make the health care assistance for people living on low incomes available to a greater number of men and women. In addition to the potential economic benefits, he says it’s vital to help keep Grady Memorial Hospital, the state’s largest safety-net facility, from making drastic cuts.

Hospitals like Grady, which have a mission to provide care to the uninsured, might struggle to continue to do so because refusing to expand Medicaid means also passing up the billions of federal dollars that come with it.

The Affordable Care Act originally required states to expand Medicaid and would have provided thousands of Georgians with health insurance. Given those initial plans for expansion, the federal health care law cut some federal reimbursements to public hospitals for treating uninsured patients. In June 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court gave individual states the power to expand Medicaid. Georgia opted out.

On a conference call last week with White House officials, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, Reed said Grady could lose up to $100 million each year in subsidies to help operate the hospital if Georgia doesn’t expand the program.

Reed said that he wants to come up with a financial plan to present to state leadership to get them to come around to the idea of expanding Medicaid. Gov. Nathan Deal, one of the mayor’s biggest political allies, has continued to oppose the state’s expansion, citing high costs that don’t mesh with the state’s budget.

The estimated annual cost to the state of expanding Medicaid ranges between $2 billion to $4 billion, but a Georgia State University study found the move could create more than 70,000 jobs and spark $8 billion in annual economic activity.

“I’m drilling down into costs as it relates to Georgia, to persuade the leadership of the state,” Reed said. “The key to the governor and I’s relationship is that there are things that we disagree on. But we want to find a way to cover 400,000 folks.”

Grady’s financial woes aren’t likely to get easier in the coming months. Fulton this week proposed cutting its annual funding to the public hospital by $25 million. The county’s cuts are hardly a done deal, but they could force the hospital’s execs between a rock and a hard place given that two funding sources are now up in the air.