Why do Georgia and other GOP-controlled states want to remove health care from Americans?
Jack Bernard  This is an op-ed by Jack Bernard, the former director of Health Planning for Georgia. A retired healthcare executive, hes a widely published national expert on health reform. On Feb. 26, 2018, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr and officials of 19 other Republican-controlled states filed a suit to do away with the Affordable Care Act, citing questionable constitutional grounds. California v. Texas ultimately ended up at the Supreme Court and was decided last month. By a 7-2 decision, the ACA remains intact for now. Georgia's suit was strongly supported by the Trump administration, which is consistent with the former presidents frequent declarations that he would repeal the ACA and replace it with something better. The Biden administration opposed the suit in 2021. Many legal scholars heavily criticized the filing as political rather than legal in nature. There were 27 states who either defended the ACA, joined in defending on appeal or filed briefs supporting the ACA. More on health care:Georgia clashes with Biden administration over Medicaid waivers  The Supreme Court agreed with the interpretation of the scholars, finding that these 18 red states had no legal standing to sue. Thus, the ACA survived, and tens of millions of Americans kept their insurance. There are 14 states which have over 12% uninsured. The majority of them are among these 18 states suing to find the ACA unconstitutional. Three have the largest number of uninsured in the nation, including Texas, Florida and our own state of Georgia. Georgia has an uninsured rate of nearly 14% and still has 1.4 million uninsured residents, even after the ACA. Georgia could have expanded Medicaid under the ACA, as 38 other states have done, but chose not to do so. Several of these 18 states are affluent, but many of these states, such as West Virginia, Alabama and Mississippi, are among the poorest in the country. And the uninsured are disproportionately low income. However, the majority of uninsured have one or more employed people in the family unit, but just dont receive health care benefits in their jobs. They simply cannot afford to buy coverage. Proportionality, more are adults than children. Additionally, more of the uninsured are people of color versus whites. The racial breakdown for uninsured adults is: American Indian 22%; Hispanic 20%; Pacific Islander 13%; Black 12%; white 8% and Asian 7%. When the ACA was passed in 2010, millions of uninsured individuals obtained insurance. By 2016, over 20 million had been added. However, under Trump the number of insured fell as the number of uninsured went from 26.7 million to 28.9 million as the rate of uninsured climbed up. Trump viewed this as a victory. The demographics hold a clue as to why. More on health care:Why Biden has an unexpected chance to expand Medicaid in red state holdouts  People of color disproportionally vote for Democrats. Whites tend to vote for the GOP and clearly form Trumps base. There certainly is a correlation, if not a totally provable causation. Surveys have shown that America is the worlds most religious democracy. Therefore, as patriotic Americans, we should all look forward to the day when partisan politics is not as important as assuring that needy Americans have the health care that they need and deserve. In the immortal words of a famous Georgian, Martin Luther King, Jr., Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.