Justice
How States Rejecting the Medicaid Expansion Sabotaged Their Biggest Cities
Major urban areas are magnets for the uninsured, and the state politicians who turned down the Medicaid expansion are not the ones who will pay to treat them.
Grady Memorial Hospital in downtown Atlanta is a formidable institution, a bulwark for the low-income and uninsured that grew from a hundred beds in 1892 to one of the largest public hospitals in the country. It has the primary Level I trauma center in the metro region. It has one of just two burn centers in the state. Each year, nearly every one of Georgia's 158 counties sends patients to the hospital for its specialized units or its open doors.
Private insurance covers little of this care: A majority of all these people who come to Grady are either on Medicaid or have no insurance at all.