by Dave Williams | May 5, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The Democratic Party of Georgia’s State Committee elected Atlanta lawyer Charlie Bailey during the weekend to serve as the party’s chair.
Bailey, a native of Harris County, has run for state attorney general twice but came up short to the Republican candidate both times.
He will succeed U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, D-Atlanta, who gave up the chairmanship earlier this year after the committee amended the party bylaws to require the party chair to serve in that position full time.
In a prepared statement, Bailey vowed to lead Georgia Democrats in an aggressive campaign.
“Republicans have controlled this state for 22 years, and in that time, 12 rural hospitals have closed and 18 more are at risk of closing because they refuse to expand Medicaid,” he wrote.
“We’ll make sure all voters know that electing more Republicans in Georgia means more billionaire tax cuts, corporate giveaways, and a host of other distractions that will not reduce prices for Georgians, and we’re going to hold them accountable.”
Bailey will take over the post immediately from Interim Chair Matthew Wilson, a former state representative from Brookhaven.
by Ty Tagami | May 2, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – A federal judge in Atlanta ordered the Trump administration on Friday to maintain the legal status of 133 current and former international college students who were legally admitted into the United States for school only to have their status suddenly revoked.
The preliminary injunction by Judge Victoria Marie Calvert of the Northern District of Georgia was anticipated after she issued a temporary restraining order in favor of the plaintiffs last month.
A federal attorney for the administration officials named as defendants, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, produced no evidence to justify revoking the plaintiffs’ status under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVIS), Calvert wrote.
“Defendants have had ample opportunity to provide the court with additional information about the SEVIS terminations but have consistently failed to do so,” says her order, which prohibits the government from repeating the revocations during the duration of the lawsuit. “Defendants’ failure to provide a single plausibly lawful explanation for its action is the exact circumstance contemplated by the arbitrary and capricious standard.”
Calvert concluded that the students would likely win their case, which accuses the government of acting in an arbitrary and capricious — and unlawful — way.
The anonymous plaintiffs include 27 foreign nationals attending a Georgia college or university or doing post-graduate work, the order says. Another 106 are in other states, and their attorneys argued that the cases should be bundled to reduce their legal costs and the workload on the court system.
Calvert allowed all 133 to proceed in this one case.
Calvert’s order indefinitely extends the temporary restraining order she issued two weeks ago that required U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to restore the plaintiffs’ visitor status.
The agency’s prior revocation of the students’ status stripped them of the right to work and would have barred them from re-entering the country if they left to visit home. Their attorney, Charles Kuck, argued it would have caused irreparable harm that outweighed the harm to the government, and the judge agreed.
Assistant U.S. Attorney R. David Powell failed to convince her that President Donald Trump’s administration would face irreparable harm from a ruling against the government that would “interfere with the executive’s right to control immigration.”
Calvert’s order is the latest legal setback for the president’s immigration policy after a string of court decisions favoring foreign students whose visitor status was similarly revoked without notice or explanation. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., also recently accused the Trump administration of “arbitrary and capricious” actions.
During last week’s hearing on this preliminary injunction, Powell said ICE has been busy restoring students’ status, with judges’ orders coming weekly, daily and “sometimes multiple per day.”
by Ty Tagami | May 2, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The future oversight over Georgia’s multi-billion-dollar Medicaid program is in limbo as companies battle over new management contracts after a lengthy bidding process.
The medical safety net covered 2.5 million children, pregnant woman, low-income adults, seniors and people with disabilities in Georgia last year.
The program totals $17 billion, with $5 billion from the state and the rest mostly from the federal government. The total is slated to rise to nearly $18 billion next year in the budget that lawmakers sent to Gov. Brian Kemp last month.
Georgia used to manage the Medicaid program directly, but about two decades ago the state decided to contract out the work. There have been tweaks along the way, with more companies added through competitive bidding. Then, more than two years ago, the Kemp administration initiated another competitive bid, and it could result in a major overhaul.
Two of the three incumbents — Amerigroup and Peach State Health Plan — lost.
Incumbent CareSource won a new contract, along with three newcomers: Humana Employers Health Plan of Georgia, Molina Health Care of Georgia and UnitedHealthcare of Georgia.
The change is prompting concern among doctors and other medical providers, who worry about service disruptions when their patients must enroll with one of the new management companies.
They remember what happened last year when Medicaid recipients had to undergo eligibility redeterminations after the requirement was waived during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly 300,000 lost coverage after enrollment peaked at more than 2.8 million in 2023.
Steven Miracle, CEO of Georgia Mountains Health Services, a non-profit in Blue Ridge with a large Medicaid clientele, thinks the new contracts will have a similar effect as his patients are forced to enroll with a different company.
“If they don’t have the information or if they aren’t able to access the technology that will allow them to sign up or if somehow, some way they miss the deadline, then there will be people who believe that they have insurance coverage that in fact don’t,” Miracle said. “People don’t pay attention, so they’re not going to be aware that that they have to re-enroll.”
Miracle’s organization is among three dozen represented by the Georgia Primary Care Association. Albert Grandy, Jr., the association’s president, drafted an open letter to Georgians in March on behalf of those organizations.
“This shift introduces a heightened risk of disruption to critical health-care services, particularly for those who depend on continuity of care to manage chronic conditions, access mental health services, or receive specialized treatments,” Grandy wrote, adding that colleagues across the state were finding it difficult to negotiate contracts with the new insurers, leaving thousands of patients unclear about whether they could continue with their current medical providers.
“These changes could have devastating consequences for patients. Delays in care, denied claims, and lapses in coverage are not just administrative headaches — they are life-threatening issues for many. Our most vulnerable populations — children in foster care, individuals with disabilities, pregnant women and seniors — cannot afford to fall through the cracks of an uncertain system,” wrote Grandy, CEO of Curtis V. Cooper Primary Health Care in Savannah.
In an interview this week, Grandy said the state might automatically assign existing Medicaid patients to one of the new insurers if they fail to enroll themselves.
So, they would still be insured, but they might find that their current doctors are out of network, he said, adding that labs, radiologists and other specialists might also be out of network and thus inaccessible.
Dr. Samantha D. Manderson, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Cordele, said patients in rural areas could find it particularly difficult to locate new providers.
“I’m especially concerned about expectant mothers who will be forced to change doctors mid-pregnancy,” she said through a spokeswoman. “Many of my rural patients would not have other options close by and would have to travel just to get the care they need, potentially delaying life-saving care.”
After the winning bids were selected, the Georgia Department of Administrative Services initiated what’s known as a protest period, during which the public can raise concerns about the pending contracts.
Kimberly Oviedo, an audiologist in Acworth, sent an email to the agency on March 10 that is among the hundreds of protest-related documents on file. She was concerned about the lengthy process that medical offices must go through to ensure their staff can be reimbursed for service.
UnitedHealthcare was non-responsive, she wrote.
“We were able to start credentialing with Molina Health, Humana, and CareSource. However, UHC says they have no idea of what the contract is that they won in GA,” Oviedo wrote. “We can’t get through to anyone with UHC to start the process. This is alarming as this is one of the largest bids won in GA.”
In an interview this week, nearly two months after she sent that email, Oviedo said she still hadn’t gotten through to UnitedHealthcare.
She said she had an initial email exchange with the company wherein an employee said UnitedHealthcare had no contract to manage Medicaid in Georgia. Although technically true — the contracts are on hold until the protests are resolved — she said the other three bid winners had contacted her to initiate the credentialing process, which she said can take six months.
Oviedo said she sent her correspondent at UnitedHealthcare links to articles about the company’s winning bid but said she never heard back. She said a large portion of her practice serves children in foster care, adding that UnitedHealthcare won that portion of the bid. She worries that her patients won’t have access to insurance and that it will affect her business.
“You can’t call anybody there. You have to go through their chat system. And then their chat person says, ‘Sorry, we don’t offer that contract,’ ” Oviedo said. “So that’s very frustrating.”
She said she made a lucky guess at an email address that worked, until the company stopped responding.
“You can sometimes reach somebody that way, but they don’t make it easy, where like Molina, you can call the rep — her phone number’s right on the email she sent saying, ‘Hey, we’re reaching out to credential you.’ “
As of late Friday afternoon, UnitedHealthcare had not responded to emails sent by Capitol Beat a week earlier seeking a response.
Among the protest documents are more serious allegations from the losing bidders, for instance that a state evaluator lowered her scores for one company after meeting with her boss, suggesting that the boss influenced the outcome; or that state employees and their consultant working on the procurement didn’t all fill out the required conflict of interest disclosures.
Both losing incumbents leveled what is possibly the most serious charge: a direct conflict of interest for CareSource.
They assert that the company hired away a Georgia Department of Community Health official during the bidding process, a woman they said had helped to write the state’s procurement competition, formally known as an “electronic Request for Proposals,” or eRFP.
That department is the agency responsible for the state’s Medicaid program and the management contracts.
She “undoubtedly would have been privy to confidential information about the development of the eRFP that would have been helpful to CareSource in preparing its proposal,” a lawyer for Peach State wrote in a protest document filed last month. At best, this creates an appearance of impropriety, the protest says, and at worst reflects “an improper effort by CareSource to gain an unfair competitive advantage.”
The protest says CareSource should be disqualified.
A spokeswoman for CareSource said the company had no comment “at this time per the RFP requirements.”
The protests have apparently delayed the new contracts. Peach State’s contract was set to expire June 30, which would have required the new contracts to be in place July 1.
But Grandy, the president of the Georgia Primary Care Association, said he heard the contract date was pushed back, initially to next summer and then to the start of 2027.
That’s fine by Miracle and his medical office in Blue Ridge.
“A longer lead time is better,” he said. “Because we’ve got to get providers credentialed with the new insurance companies. We’ve got to get the organizational relationships set up so that we can do billing collections. I mean there’s a lot that has to happen. You can’t just say, ‘Okay we’ve got a new company.’ Health care is much more complex than that.”
by Dave Williams | May 2, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – University of Georgia officials broke ground Friday on a research farm next to the Georgia National Fairgrounds in Perry.
The 250-acre Grand Farm will serve as a hub for research, education, and sustainable farming practices. Innovative technology including precision agriculture, robotics and data analysis will be used to increase productivity while conserving resources.
Grand Farm will partner with UGA’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences on the project.
“This collaboration represents the perfect marriage of tradition and innovation,” said Nick T. Place, the college’s dean and director. “By bringing together the college’s world-class researchers and the UGA Institute for Integrative Precision Agriculture with Grand Farms’ cutting-edge technologies, we will revolutionize the way we feed and clothe the world’s population.”
The roots of the partnership go back five years, when University System of Georgia Chancellor Sonny Perdue helped launch a Grand Farm project in North Dakota while serving as U.S. secretary of agriculture.
“This partnership is a great example of how Grand Farm works to advance agriculture technology and solve grower pain points across varied geographies,” Grand Farm Executive Director William Aderholt said.
“Collaborating with the University of Georgia allows us to leverage their extensive research capabilities and expertise in agricultural sciences, enhancing our ability to innovate and implement solutions that are tailored to diverse agricultural environments.”
The farm’s first field projects are expected to roll out this year.
by Dave Williams | May 1, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Gov. Brian Kemp signed legislation Thursday codifying into state law the right of women struggling to get pregnant to receive in vitro fertilization.
House Bill 428, which the General Assembly passed with just one “no” vote, was among a half dozen health-care measures the governor signed during a ceremony at the Savannah Convention Center.
The legislation’s chief sponsor was Rep. Lehman Franklin, R-Statesboro, whose wife June received IVF treatment and is expecting a child next month.
“(Families) deserve to have the chance to experience this great gift from God,” Kemp said before signing the bill.
The legislation was prompted by an Alabama Supreme Court ruling last year that declared frozen embryos created through IVF must be treated as children. The decision essentially banned the procedure in that state until Alabama lawmakers passed a bill protecting IVF and Republican Gov. Kay Ivey quickly signed it.
“We needed to ensure that here in Georgia, no family would have to question accessibility to IVF,” said state House Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington, who made the IVF measure one of his top priorities for this year’s legislative session.
Other health-care bills the governor signed Thursday included:
- House Bill 94, which requires insurance companies to cover the costs of fertility preservation services when medically necessary treatments for cancer and other life-threatening diseases impairs fertility.
- House Bill 89, requiring health-care providers, hospitals, and pharmacies to release clinical records of certain deceased patients to the state’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee.
- House Bill 584, which transfers oversight of various mental-health programs from the Georgia Department of Community Health to the state Department of Behavioral Health and Development Disabilities.
- House Bill 473, an annual update of the list of controlled substances that are considered dangerous.
- Senate Bill 55, which provides a pay raise to Georgians with disabilities who are currently being paid subminimum wages.
by Dave Williams | Apr 30, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The U.S. Senate has passed legislation introduced by Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., aimed at improving safety and security inside the federal prison system.
The Prison Staff Safety Enhancement Act, which senators passed by unanimous consent Thursday night, would require the Justice Department to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy for addressing inmate-on-staff sexual assault.
The department also would have to submit data on the prevalence of inmate-on-staff sexual harassment to the agency’s inspector general and establish a national standard for preventing and reducing sexual abuse in federal prisons.
The bill – which Ossoff is sponsoring with Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee – is a follow-up to legislation then-President Joe Biden signed last year establishing independent oversight of the federal Bureau of Prisons.
“I remain focused on oversight of the federal prison system and ending sexual abuse in prisons and jails, including the abuse of prison staff,” Ossoff said Wednesday. “Senator Blackburn and I brought Republicans and Democrats together to pass this bipartisan bill to help end sexual abuse in federal prisons.”
According to a February 2023 report by the Justice Department, 40% of more than 7,000 prison employees surveyed reported having been sexually harassed by an inmate.
Ossoff and Blackburn launched an inquiry last September into reports of inmate-on-staff sexual assault through their leadership roles on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. That led to the Senate passing the bill late last year – also by unanimous consent – but Congress adjourned for the year without the U.S. House of Representatives acting on it.
