Georgia Senate Majority Leader Steve Gooch advocates for the Senate rules resolution on Wednesday. (Photo credit: Rebecca Grapevine)
ATLANTA –- The Georgia House and Senate passed separate resolutions primarily along party lines Wednesday setting rules for the two-year term that began this week.
The resolutions set the procedures – most of them routine – for the operation of the two legislative chambers. But this year, the resolutions included a few notable changes.
Most controversial was the addition of new provisions that exempt communications between lawmakers and non-legislators about legislative business from public disclosure.
Rep. Stacey Evans, D-Atlanta, complained that the new rule keeping communications from the public could be read to include discussions between lawmakers and members of the executive branch of state government.
House Majority Leader Chuck Efstration, R-Dacula, said the rule does not apply to members of the executive branch.
“We can’t all be experts on every issue,” he said. “We have to rely on others who have expertise.”
“We should have the ability to speak freely to third parties about the legislative process,” freshman Sen. Colton Moore, R-Trenton, added when the issue came up in the Senate.
House Minority Whip Sam Park, D-Lawrenceville, argued that House rules aimed at maintaining decorum in the House chamber and committee meeting rooms could have a chilling effect on free speech rights.
House Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington, said the rules on decorum are simply clarifying policies the House has followed in the past.
“You will have an adequate opportunity to be heard, cast your vote, and represent your people,” Burns responded.
On the Senate side, the new rules resolution requires the Senate president pro tempore – currently Sen. John Kennedy, R-Macon – to resign if he or she publicly announces a run for a different elective office.
The resolution also eliminated the Senate’s Special Judiciary Committee, traditionally the province of minority Democrats, and replaced it with a standing committee on children and families.
The new Senate rules also clarify that the lieutenant governor is authorized to engage in legislative activities within the Senate. Newly elected Lt. Gov. Burt Jones will begin presiding over the Senate after he is inaugurated on Thursday.
Only one House member and one senator voted across party lines on the new rules. Freshman Rep. Mitchell Horner, R-Ringgold, voted against the House rules, while veteran Sen. Donzella James, D-Atlanta, supported the Senate rules.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney.
ATLANTA – The Fulton County special grand jury investigating whether former President Donald Trump should be criminally prosecuted for allegedly interfering in Georgia’s 2020 election results has now delivered its final report.
But it’s not yet clear what the report says and whether it will be made public. Though the special grand jury recommended that the report be published, Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney still has to decide whether Georgia law requires a special grand jury’s report to be published.
Arguments about publishing the report are scheduled for Jan. 24, McBurney wrote in a Monday order.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis spearheaded the effort to get the special grand jury appointed. For the past nine months, grand jurors have been investigating whether Trump or others unlawfully interfered in Georgia’s 2020 election results.
“The court thanks the grand jurors for their dedication, professionalism, and significant commitment of time and attention to this important matter. It was no small sacrifice to serve,” McBurney wrote.
Willis will use the special grand jury’s findings to help decide whether to empanel a standard grand jury to consider bringing charges against Trump and/or his associates for their alleged wrongdoing surrounding the 2020 elections.
Trump pressured Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes for Trump during a lengthy phone call in January 2021. Democratic President Joe Biden carried Georgia’s 16 electoral votes by a margin of 11,779.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
The homepage for the new Georgia Access website set up by the state government this fall.
ATLANTA – After failing to win federal approval to exit the federal insurance marketplace earlier this year, Georgia has established its own health-insurance portal directing people to private insurers and brokers to buy health insurance.
The new website, called Georgia Access, includes links to 10 health-insurance companies – including big players such as United, Kaiser Permanente, and Aetna – as well as seven online brokers, organizations that help people shop for and enroll in health insurance.
The dueling state and federal websites each offer a different route to the same destination: signing up for health insurance.
Georgians can use the links on GeorgiaAccess.gov to explore the insurance companies’ and brokers’ offerings, which include but are not limited to the same marketplace plans offered on the federal website.
The new Georgia Access site also includes links to companies and brokers that offer dental and vision plans, basic information about Medicaid and PeachCare for Kids, and links to state health-care agencies that assist with mental health.
But notably absent from the state’s new portal is a link to the federal HealthCare.gov, a one-stop shop for buying health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act. The HealthCare.gov website provides comparisons of the different companies’ health plans.
The state decided to set up the GeorgiaAccess.gov portal with the resources it had initially devoted to its plan to exit the federal marketplace, said Gregg Conley, executive counsel for the Georgia Department of Insurance.
Republican Gov. Brian Kemp first sought permission to exit the federal health insurance marketplace back in 2020. But the Biden administration rejected the Georgia plan earlier this year after analyses showed it would cover fewer, not more, Georgians than the federal marketplace.
According to Georgia Access, 1.3 million Georgians lack health insurance.
“I would encourage people to sign up for health [insurance],” Conley said. “What we don’t want is people not to have health care.”
But many advocates argue that online brokers and private insurers are not the best custodians of consumers’ interests.
Insurance companies and brokers, most of which are for-profit entities, may push people to enroll in “substandard” plans that don’t cover all services, Joan Alker, a research professor at Georgetown University, wrote earlier this year.
Brokers may fail to help people enroll in Medicaid or other state health-insurance plans for people with low incomes and they may not adequately cater to the needs of racial and ethnic minorities and people who are not proficient in English, Alker wrote.
In Georgia, legislative Democrats have called for expanding Medicaid to address the state’s large population of uninsured people.
“Georgia should expand Medicaid,” House Minority Leader James Beverly, D-Macon, said Wednesday. “I am calling on the governor and the Georgia legislature to make it priority #1 to ensure every Georgian has access to quality health-care benefits.”
Open enrollment for marketplace plans ends on Jan. 15, 2023. That gives Georgians just two more weeks to select their plans for next year, whether through the links provided on GeorgiaAccess.gov or the federal HealthCare.gov.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – After years of legal wrangling, the countdown to the July 1, 2023, launch date of Georgia’s Medicaid work requirements program is underway.
The new plan – officially called Pathways to Coverage – will require enrollees to complete 80 hours of work, education, job training, or community service per month to get Medicaid health insurance. Many will also have to pay a monthly premium.
Once the program begins, Georgia will be the sole state with work requirements for Medicaid. Adults between ages 18 and 64 who earn less than 100% of the federal poverty level – and who are not otherwise eligible for Medicaid – are the targeted group. For 2022, the federal poverty level was $13,590 for a single person and $27,750 for a family of four.
Though exact numbers are difficult to calculate, it’s expected that the Pathways program will provide insurance to only a small percentage of the 1.3 million Georgians without health insurance.
State officials estimate around 345,000 Georgians would be eligible for the new program. Back in 2020, they said they expected only about 64,000 people to actually enroll in the program.
Now that the program is becoming a reality, the Georgia Department of Community Health (DCH), the state Medicaid agency, has requested funds to cover up to 100,000 people in the upcoming budget, said spokesman David Graves. That’s 29% of those who will be eligible.
“Georgia leadership has put in place barriers that they know, that they have calculated, will prevent … people from enrolling,” said Leonardo Cuello, research professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, about the discrepancy between the number of eligible people and the number expected to enroll.
Critics of Pathways contend the program will cover far fewer Georgians and cost more than a full expansion of Medicaid, as 39 states have done.
Leah Chan, senior health analyst at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Atlanta, said the new program will cost around $2,420 per enrollee while it would cost only $496 per enrollee if the state fully expanded Medicaid.
“New financial incentives under the American Rescue Plan sweeten the deal [for full Medicaid expansion] and more than offset the state cost of expansion for at least the first two years,” Chan said.
Enrollees in Georgia Pathways will need to certify their employment each month. Those who earn more than 50% of the federal poverty level will also be required to pay a monthly premium ranging from $7 to $11, with an additional surcharge for people who use tobacco products.
The program will provide a two-month grace period for people who do not pay their premiums. But after three months of non-payment, they will lose the insurance. They can be reinstated if they make at least one monthly payment within 90 days.
The state plans to use the existing benefits portal, Georgia Gateway, for program applicants to manage their work-requirement reporting, said Graves, the DCH spokesperson. He said Georgians can expect to learn more about the details of the program over the coming months.
Critics say the machinery necessary to track enrollee work records and payments will dramatically increase bureaucratic burdens both for Medicaid recipients and the state.
“When you think about working families in Georgia, they are busy with their jobs, getting kids to school and the doctor, paying the stack of bills that come in every month, and the last thing they need is additional red tape … every month just to keep their health insurance from getting terminated,” Cuello said.
Cuello said the state will have to develop “expensive administrative processes” to ensure compliance with the work requirements. The [congressional Government Accountability Office] and states have estimated costs ranging from $70 million to $270 million a year to implement and run this type of program, he said.
DCH has not yet decided whether it will need to hire additional staff to help run the program, Graves said.
The Pathways program allows some exceptions to the work-requirement rules. Enrollees will be allowed 120 hours of “non-compliance,” that is of not meeting the work requirements, in every 12-month period.
But routine child care is not on the list of exceptions. Other states that previously attempted work requirements ensured that caring for young children was a valid reason for not meeting the requirements and would not result in losing insurance.
“A stay-at-home parent taking care of two young kids in a family that lives at half of the poverty level … can’t afford child care, and they can’t just leave two young kids at home alone,” Cuello said. “Georgia’s plan makes no exceptions for these parents, and they will be denied health insurance.”
The plan has federal approval to operate until Sept. 30, 2025.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
Georgia’s Broadband Availability Map shows areas lacking broadband service in light yellow. (courtesy Georgia Broadband Office)
ATLANTA – The federal government should give Georgia and other states more time to submit corrections to new maps that show where broadband service does not reach, Georgia’s congressional delegation urged in a letter Wednesday.
At stake is how the federal government allocates $42.5 billion in funding earmarked for bolstering broadband in the infrastructure spending bill Congress passed last year.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has launched an effort to more accurately map where broadband is not available. The agency is allowing state governments – and ordinary Americans – to submit corrections to the map.
“We believe that federal programs to support broadband expansion must start with accurate broadband mapping,” the Georgia politicians, led by Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., and Rep. Rick Allen, R-Augusta, wrote Wednesday in a letter to the FCC.
The letter contends the FCC’s deadline of Jan. 13 for submitting corrections is too soon. It asks the commission to extend the deadline by at least 60 days so Georgia, and others, can ensure the maps are accurate.
“We are concerned that this timeline … is too short for states to submit a thorough challenge petition in the correct and comprehensive manner as determined by the FCC,” the letter notes. The federal government released the full data set in November.
More than 1 million Georgians lack access to broadband, according to some estimates.
If the FCC does not extend the deadline, up to 220,000 areas that lack broadband, most of them in rural parts of Georgia, could be missing from the federal map, the letter states. That could reduce the amount of federal funding the state gets to build out its broadband infrastructure.
Georgia emerged as a national leader in accurately mapping the broadband shortage in 2020 when it published its own broadband-shortage maps, which showed the problem is more extensive than the federal maps indicated.
“Georgia has been a leader when it comes to these maps,” said Will Rinehart, senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
