Health-care advocates are warning Georgia residents to prepare for substantial increases in their health insurance premiums next year, impacting those who purchase coverage through the government marketplace.<\/p>\n
Health-care advocates warned\u00a0Thursday that Georgia residents who have to find\u00a0their own insurance in the government marketplace should expect significant rate increases next year.<\/p>\n
Insurance companies are filing rate increase requests with regulators, arguing that federal budget cuts and\u00a0the end\u00a0of COVID-19 tax credits are the main\u00a0drivers, said\u00a0Anthony Wright, executive\u00a0director of Families USA.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are individual workers and\u00a0working families who simply\u00a0don\u2019t get coverage on the job or through public programs like Medicaid\u00a0or Medicare,\u201d Wright said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wright said\u00a0affected\u00a0workers include retail and\u00a0restaurant employees, ride-hail and\u00a0food-delivery\u00a0drivers, beauticians, barbers,\u00a0plumbers and other self-employed workers.<\/p>\n
Georgia\u2019s government marketplace is called\u00a0Georgia Access. The state also offers Pathways to Coverage for those nearer the poverty level.<\/p>\n
The group KFF calculates that\u00a0a half million<\/a>\u00a0Georgians could\u00a0lose coverage. Another group, Georgians for a Healthy Future (GHF), puts that\u00a0number at 340,000<\/a>, estimating an average rate increase of 75%.\u00a0(The smaller figure is attributed to the expiration of the tax credits alone. The larger figure includes tax credits and budget cuts.)<\/p>\n \u201cIf costs soar and\u00a0coverage slips away, the consequences will ripple through every part of our state at almost every income level,\u201d said\u00a0Whitney Griggs, health policy\u00a0director for GHF.<\/p>\n Georgia\u2019s Office of Insurance was not immediately available to clarify the numbers, but it will not be long before insurance shoppers see the result, with enrollment for 2026 likely to start around November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Health-care advocates are warning Georgia residents to prepare for substantial increases in their health insurance premiums next year,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160138,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97427,97,252,253],"class_list":["post-160137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-capitol-beat","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}