A state that forces hospital closings by refusing Medicare expansion
while spending a billion dollars a year on locking up too many
prisoners has its priorities wrong.
Tom Baxter wrote for SaportaReport yesterday,
Ominous signs for rural Georgia as hospitals shut their doors,
Lewis forecast at the beginning of the year that five to six rural
hospitals might be forced to close in 2013, and already there have
been two.
Calhoun Memorial Hospital in Arlington closed in February,
and
Stewart-Webster Hospital in Richland shut its doors last week.
That’s only a foretaste, Lewis says, of what’s going to happen when
the Affordable Care Act next year eliminates the
subsidies which
have been key to the survival of many of these hospitals, and
imposes new standards — for instances, penalizing hospitals
for readmitting patients in less than 30 days — which will
directly impact their bottom line.
“We will probably get hurt worse than any state in the
nation,” Lewis said last week. “It’s not like we will be
friendly faces to the feds, and they’re going to come in and do
major damage to us. ” He’s certainly not an enthusiastic fan
of Obamacare, but thinks the state has no choice but to accept the
Medicaid expansion which was intended as compensation for what the
new law takes away.
“With Obamacare coming down the pike, if we don’t get some
kind of relief in (Medicaid) expansion, we will face certain
death,” Lewis said last week.
Ah, so the problem isn’t ObamaCare: it’s Gov. Deal’s refusal to
accept Medicaid expansion!
The AJC warned us about that back in August:
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