America’s three-year experiment with an approximation of European-style universal health care will come to an end May 11 when the federal public health emergency brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic expires.
A series of health-care and insurance-coverage provisions that were put in place to deal with the pandemic are about to go away, which experts in the field say will make it just as hard to access care for many as it was before coronavirus struck Georgia and the nation.
Continuing to offer free vaccines to that group makes sense because low-income Georgians on Medicaid or without insurance coverage of any sort tend to work in jobs where the risk of exposure to COVID is greater than to others who can work from home, said Leah Chan, senior health policy analyst with the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, an Atlanta-based nonprofit.
