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Asshole Of The Day

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Asshole of the Day finds the public figures who are the biggest assholes each day
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Is Nathan Deal Asshole of the Day?

Is Gov. Nathan Deal asshole of the day for trying to deny poor people emergency room access after he denied them Medicaid?

Gov. Nathan Deal has often called on Congress to reconsider the Affordable Care Act. But on Monday evening, he pushed his former Washington colleagues to revisit a separate health care law that fewer politicians openly critique.
The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act is a 1986 law that requires hospitals to provide emergency health care treatment to anyone who needs it, regardless of citizenship or their ability to pay. It’s provided life-saving care to countless people, but it’s also strained hospital resources and turned emergency rooms into the first stop, instead of a last resort, for some.
“If they really want to get serious about lowering the cost of health care in this country, they would revisit another federal statute that has been there for a long time,” Deal told a crowd of dozens at a University of Georgia political science alumni gathering. “It came as a result of bad facts, and we have a saying that bad facts make bad law.”
Legislative supporters in the 1980s cited cases of pregnant women being turned away from emergency rooms because they couldn’t pay. Deal, who long served on a key House health panel, said lawmakers can build in protections for pregnant women and others while tightening access to ERs in other ways. Said the governor:
“I think we should be able in this passage of time to figure out ways to deal with those situations but not have the excessive costs associated with unnecessary visits to the emergency room.”
This is an important topic for Deal, given that many hospitals in rural Georgia are caught in the financial pinch caused by the governor’s refusal to expand Medicaid rolls, and the Affordable Care Act’s reduction of federal cash for indigent care.
http://politics.blog.ajc.com/2014/02/25/nathan-deal-tighten-access-to-hospital-emergency-rooms/

You see, here's what's happened:

  1. Obamacare created a system of universal healthcare.
  2. Obamacare lowered payments to hospitals that the government used to pay so that hospitals would treat people without health insurance, because now people had insurance.
  3. The Supreme Court said that while Obamacare was constitutional, states didn't have to take the Medicaid expansion.
  4. Some states, like Georgia under Gov. Nathan Deal, refused to take the Medicaid expansion, despite pressure from hospitals to do so.
  5. Four hospitals closed because they can't afford to treat people without insurance without help from the government.
  6. Gov. Deal still won't reconsider taking the Medicaid expansion, but instead wants emergency rooms to refuse to treat the uninsured.

Amazing really.

Downplaying the need for the government to ensure that every person has health insurance, Mitt Romney on Sunday suggested that emergency room care suffices as a substitute for the uninsured.
"Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance," he said in an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS's "60 Minutes" that aired Sunday night. "If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care."
This constitutes a dramatic reversal in position for Romney, who passed a universal health care law in Massachusetts, in part, to eliminate the costs incurred when the uninsured show up in emergency rooms for care. Indeed, in both his book and in high-profile interviews during the campaign, Romney has touted his achievement in stamping out these inefficiencies while arguing that the same thing should be done at the national level.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/23/mitt-romney-60-minutes-health-care_n_1908129.html

Yeah.

Photo source: http://gov.georgia.gov/photo-gallery-0

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