Gov. Brian Kemp, with jubilant community members, broke ground Wednesday on a freestanding emergency room in south Fulton County, aiming to address a hospital desert that has existed in that area since Wellstar Atlanta Medical Center-South closed its ER in 2022.
The Grady Health System facility, with just ER services and no regular hospital beds, is the first such project in metro Atlanta and is expected to open late next year.
“We’ve seen firsthand how important they are but also how effective they are,” Kemp said. “This facility literally will save lives.”
The facility represents a much-needed salve for the south Fulton community and other emergency rooms in metro Atlanta that have taken on extra patients since Wellstar closed two hospitals in Fulton County.
When Wellstar Atlanta Medical Center and AMC-South closed, people left with more than a 15-minute car ride from an emergency room are disproportionately Black with lower-than-average incomes, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
However, the launch takes place just as Congress considers major budget cuts that have the potential to alter health care nationwide, and undermine the 16-bed facility’s business plan.
Congressional Republicans looking to trim the budget have taken steps that could lead to major cuts for Medicaid, the state and federal health insurance for low-income people that insures 2 million Georgians. That includes one in every four Grady patients.
At the same time, many of those same Republican leaders insist Medicaid benefits will not be harmed. The mixed messages have left health industry leaders and patient advocates uneasy, but Grady Health System CEO John Haupert said it was too early to be spooked on a day like the groundbreaking.
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“I’m actually full of happiness that we’re able to address access to care in this community,” Haupert said.
Kemp did not take questions at the ceremony, and declined to answer a question from an AJC reporter about Medicaid. But this week he signed on to a letter with 21 other Republican governors backing the Republican-led progress toward a federal budget, with the goal of extending President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and to “reinstitute fiscal sanity.”
So far, the GOP-led House of Representatives has passed a budget outline that directs the committee that oversees Medicaid and some other services to cut $880 billion.
Republicans who backed the bill insist Medicaid cuts are not the goal.
“The word Medicaid is not even in this bill,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.). Trump, who urged support for the bill, assured the public that wouldn’t “touch” Medicaid, except for rooting out fraud.
For its part, the GOP-led Senate left the directive to slash the budget in place, and added what it called a deficit-neutral reserve fund aimed at “protecting Medicare and Medicaid.”
Medicaid in Georgia serves mostly children. It also pays for some elderly people’s nursing home rooms, and insures some low-income disabled people. Kemp has recently expanded it to cover some low-income workers and parents of young children. About two-thirds of Georgia Medicaid bills are paid by federal funds, and the rest by state funds.
“Medicaid matters tremendously,” Haupert said. “There’s a lot of things that could happen catastrophically. There’s also things that, if they were methodical about where they focused, would possibly pull out funding without affecting the health care providers.
“Every day we’re watching.”
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Grady executives have told the AJC they believe the facility will pay for itself. A key part of that is Medicaid, because so many Georgians don’t have any type of insurance.
Hospital companies often want to build in wealthy areas, so they will end up serving more patients with commercial insurance. With this hospital, Grady said it believes a substantial number of patients will have commercial insurance, but enough won’t have any insurance that it will need the Medicaid stream.
The initial $39 million building costs are being paid partly by Fulton County and partly by Grady, with help from federal funds Kemp awarded to Grady during the pandemic.
The state has been slowly warming to the idea of building stand-alone emergency rooms from new, and in 2019 Kemp signed a law allowing the facilities. The first opened in 2023 in the North Georgia town of Trion, and Grady’s facility in Union City will be the first in metro Atlanta.
Freestanding ER’s have been around for decades in other states, especially Texas, where they’ve run into accusations of price-gouging. ER’s are generally allowed to charge hospital prices, and sometimes they have done that for services unsuspecting patients could have gotten much cheaper at an urgent care clinic.
Kemp called it just a start, and the “big vision that we all have for this campus is ultimately to provide a full slate of medical services here in Union City.”
Union City Mayor Vince Williams said the facility is “something we have been dreaming about.”
“This is a victory for the entire Southside,” he added.
Senior editor of data journalism Charles Minshew contributed to this article.
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