ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) – Open enrollment for health coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplace is now underway for more than a million Georgians, but this year comes with added uncertainty.

The tax credits that help make coverage affordable may not be extended, leaving many residents unsure about their health care costs….

According to Georgians for a Healthy Future, nearly 1.5 million Georgians rely on ACA tax credits. 93% of those enrolled in the marketplace depend on the subsidies to keep coverage affordable.

LOUISVILLE — For more than a year, Jessica Lewis has made the 50-minute drive north from her home in Louisville to her doctor’s office in the Augusta suburb of Grovetown.

At times, the 35-year-old tax preparer made weekly trips so she could see the obstetrician who was providing her care while pregnant. She gave birth a year ago and still goes to Grovetown for her son’s pediatrician visits. Lewis said the nearly two-hour round trip was the best way for her to get consistent care.

The prenatal care options in her hometown are more limited. She could have seen a certified nurse midwife through Jefferson Hospital, but Lewis said she was more comfortable traveling to Grovetown….

Georgia is consistently ranked among states with the worst maternal mortality rate with 49.2 deaths per 100,000 live births annually, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Over the years the crisis has been exacerbated by hospital closings. Since 2010, nine rural hospitals have closed in Georgia, according to nonprofit advocacy organization Georgians for a Healthy Future. And earlier this year, St. Mary’s Sacred Heart Hospital in Lavonia announced it would cut its labor and delivery unit to save money.

Those closures result in some patients making long drives for checkups or to deliver their babies.

ATLANTA (AP) — There may be no rank-and-file Democratic senator with more at stake from the federal government shutdown than Georgia’s Jon Ossoff.

He is the party’s only senator who is seeking reelection next year in a state that Republican Donald Trump won in 2024, and any chance that Democrats may have in regaining Senate control depends on Ossoff holding the seat. As the second-longest shutdown in history drags on and Democrats insist on extending expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies beyond year’s end, more people in Georgia than most other states are likely to lose health insurance if the tax credits go away.

About 1.5 million Georgians are insured this year through Democratic President Barack Obama’s health overhaul that was enacted in 2010. Because Georgia is one of 10 states that has not fully expanded Medicaid, as was envisioned under “Obamacare,” it has a larger population covered by the law’s marketplace policies than in Medicaid-expansion states.

“Particularly because we have such a high number of low-income folks in our marketplace, and they’re very price sensitive, we have a much higher risk of seeing those people drop out of the insurance pool,” said Laura Colbert, executive director of Georgians for a Healthy Future.

The group, which promotes expanded health coverage, projects that 340,000 Georgians could drop coverage because of higher prices.

Dr. Joy Baker, an obstetrician and gynecologist within the Wellstar Health System, has seen patients who have driven from two and a half hours away for care. Some within the health care industry are calling this a crisis and fear things are about to get worse.

Once the One Big Beautiful Bill was signed into law on July 4, 2025, by President Donald Trump, it triggered coverage cuts to Medicaid. For rural hospitals that treat large numbers of Medicaid recipients, that means less revenue. According to the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, Georgia currently has 71 rural hospitals, and the loss of funds is putting as many as 20 rural hospitals at risk of closing and 28 could experience a loss of services.

In September, St. Mary’s Sacred Heart Hospital in rural northeast Georgia was forced to close its labor and delivery unit, and it’s an hour drive to the next maternity care facility in Athens. In southeast Georgia, Evans Memorial Hospital has already closed its OB/GYN unit, and the intensive care unit might be next. With nine rural hospitals closing since 2010, local health advocates say Georgia ranks third in the nation for hospital closures.

On Thursday’s edition of “Closer Look,” Baker joins program host Rose Scott along with Whitney Griggs, the director of health policy at Georgians for a Healthy Future, to discuss the impact this will have on rural communities.

Millions of Americans are already seeing their health insurance costs soar for 2026 as Congress remains deadlocked over extending covid-era subsidies for premiums.

The bitter fight sparked a government shutdown at the start of October. Democrats refuse to vote on government-funding legislation unless it extends the subsidies, while Republicans insist on separate negotiations after reopening the government. Now lawmakers face greater pressure to act as Americans who buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act are seeing, or are about to see, the consequences of enhanced subsidies expiring at the end of the year…

If Congress doesn’t extend the extra subsidies, Georgia could lose around 340,000 people from its 1.5 million-person marketplace, according to an estimate by nonpartisan advocacy group Georgians for a Healthy Future.

The enhanced subsidies had fully covered monthly premiums for millions of lower-income people in the marketplaces. Many of them will have to start kicking in some of their own money starting Jan. 1, while people with higher incomes will see their monthly subsidies shrink.

ATLANTA — The federal government is closed for a third day. With national park visitor centers locked and hundreds of thousands of federal employees furloughed, Republicans and Democrats say voters should hold the other side responsible for the fallout.

But in Georgia, some are focused less on who’s to blame than how long the shutdown will last.

The last shutdown dragged on for 35 days from Dec. 2018 to Jan. 2019. Among the hardest hit were Transportation Security Administration employees at Atlanta’s humongous airport who had to keep working without pay.

Laura Colbert, executive director of the advocacy group Georgians for a Healthy Future, said enrollment on the insurance policy marketplace created through the ACA has tripled in Georgia since the subsidies were passed in 2020.

Many state Medicaid systems today are a patchwork of vendors and capabilities not designed to pull and track data from disparate sources — a capability at the core of tracking compliance with work requirements and ensuring people aren’t improperly disenrolled, she said.

For example, Georgia — currently the only state to have a live work requirements program — has seen enrollment fall well short of expectations, in part due to issues with the state’s portal that processes Medicaid applications.

“It hasn’t been as successful as we would like it to be,” said Deanna Williams, an enrollment assister with health advocacy group Georgians for a Healthy Future.

Before the portal was updated this spring, it frequently crashed when people tried to submit applications, didn’t work on smartphones and required documents to be uploaded in certain formats, according to Williams.

“It wasn’t that the client does not work, or doesn’t have proof of their income — they were just having issues uploading the documents to verify their income. Which, if not provided within a timely manner, could lead to your application being denied,” she said.

It’s still early days, but states are trying to build IT systems that can prevent that, speakers said. Utah, for example, is connecting its Medicaid department with the state’s higher education database, so it can more easily track education hours for beneficiaries, Strohecker said.

Georgia’s Williams recommended that states also start to think about partnerships with trusted community groups for member outreach and education, including health centers, churches, schools and libraries.

Communications about Medicaid changes should be repeated frequently and across multiple platforms, like in-person, email, text messages and phone calls, she said.

States are juggling the allocation of already tight resources. Strohecker said that Utah is planning to hire some additional staff to help with eligibility oversight, but is mostly making do with what it already has.

“There are lots of things we might want to do, but there are many things we have to do. And if we’re going to do them well we have to align our existing staff and resources behind those,” she said, adding later: “Time is of the essence.”

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the former TV doctor who now leads the nation’s Medicare and Medicaid programs, spoke at an Atlanta health care conference on Wednesday, touting work requirements and his own agency’s efforts to recruit tech workers.

Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, spoke at Health Connect South, an annual conference for people from across health care professions. He was interviewed by former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, a former Georgia congressman, during a keynote session….

Oz said Trump’s charge to him was to reduce “fraud, waste, abuse.” Medicaid work requirements like those implemented in Georgia are designed to ensure recipients have “skin in the game.”

Oz said many Medicaid recipients spend hours watching television daily, but they “don’t want to just stay at home; they do want to go work.”

Georgia’s work requirements program has foundered, and local advocates have criticized the program.

Before it launched, the state Department of Community Health requested funds to cover 100,000 people in its first year, which concluded in July. It had enrolled just over 8,000 by the end of June.

“In Georgia, most low-income adults are already working, caring for family, or living with serious health conditions,” Whitney Griggs, director of health policy at Georgians for a Healthy Future, told Healthbeat. “Instead of helping families, the program’s red tape has kept hundreds of thousands of Georgians locked out of affordable coverage. Georgia’s experience should be considered proof that these policies do not work.”