Georgia’s biggest health stories for 2023

Wellstar Health System confirmed earlier this month that it will shut down its clinic in East Point, closing its doors for good on Jan. 12. The health workers who staffed it will be offered jobs at other Wellstar facilities outside the area, and Wellstar officials said they will suggest patients go instead to a public clinic next door where Wellstar has helped pay for an expansion.

The East Point clinic that is closing is all that remains of Wellstar’s former hospital there, Atlanta-Medical Center-South. Wellstar shut down AMC-South in 2022, leaving no emergency room in Fulton County south of I-20. That was months before Wellstar made national news shutting down the main AMC hospital in downtown Atlanta. No plans have been announced for the downtown location, which remains vacant.

2. Georgia’s Medicaid woes

Beginning this year, all states are working to ensure everyone on Medicaid still qualifies for the coverage and to remove those who are no longer eligible. But the rate at which Georgia is eliminating children from coverage is well above average, according to the federal government. And the vast majority of people of all ages who were disenrolled were never even evaluated, but dropped for lack of paperwork. Gov. Brian Kemp announced in December he would spend $54 million in federal pandemic relief funds to bolster the understaffed effort and fix problems in the system.

Kemp’s plan to offer Medicaid health coverage to 370,000 of Georgia’s poorest uninsured adults — known as “Georgia Pathways to Coverage,” — got off to a very slow start enrolling uninsured poor adults after it opened July 1. The plan is intended to cover those who typically make too much to qualify for traditional Medicaid, but too little to afford commercial insurance. Georgia has the third worst rate in the nation of uninsured people.

3. COVID-19 dwindles, but still dampens the holidays

In the spring, President Joe Biden signed legislation ending the U.S. public health emergency for COVID-19, which had been declared by President Trump in March 2020 to free up federal funds and resources to combat the pandemic.

But the virus still lingers: COVID-19, as well as influenza and the respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, all continued to put a damper on holiday gatherings this winter. This year, all three viruses are causing a rise in emergency room visits and hospitalizations, but the numbers in the U.S. and Georgia are not as high as in previous years.

4. Georgia’s rate of pregnancy-related deaths is among the nation’s worst

The Georgia Department of Public Health in July released its investigation of maternal deaths for the years 2018 through 2020, finding a 20% higher rate of deaths from pregnancy than the last time the state issued such a report. New Georgia moms died from reasons relating to the pregnancy at a rate of 30.2 deaths for every 100,000 live births. Black women were more than two times as likely to die a pregnancy-related death than white women.

One in 10 Georgians know of someone who has died during pregnancy, at delivery, or soon after giving birth, according to findings revealed at a Emory University conference on maternal mortality. Among the top needs are better access to health care, and health insurance.

5. Atlanta VA reduces missed mental health calls

In August, the Atlanta VA said it was working to hire more employees to answer its phones and has reduced the number of mental health calls that are going unanswered, months after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found evidence that veterans in crisis were struggling to reach the health care system.

In April, the AJC reported allegations that thousands of mental health calls to the Atlanta VA had gone unanswered over the past year, according to a whistleblower complaint. The complaint alleges that out of roughly 22,000 mental health calls that were made to the Atlanta VA Health Care System over a 12-month period, about 7,200 went unanswered.