THE STATE’S trauma centers were wheeled into the General Assembly in critical condition ... and allowed to slip into a coma because the legislative doctor decided against any treatment.
Worse, in a toll that will be impossible to tally but is guaranteed, there will doubtless be Georgians — or tourists passing through — who will die unnecessarily because the state’s emergency-care centers are too few and far between.
While a year’s delay between now and the next legislative session when something (maybe) more permanent is done does not assure a doomsday scenario, it’s still an incredible situation. Everyone — health professionals and other experts, even legislators who intensively studied the situation — agreed this was the most instantly urgent problem the state was facing and required a sure funding source.
Yet beyond the most stopgap of measures— $58 million for one year of added funding, plus some likely tinkering with Medicaid payments to squeeze out a few million more — nothing was done.
AN ASSURED annual infusion of approximately $74 million from a new $10 surcharge on car-tag fees perished, a hit-and-run victim of the tax-reform stalemate. A last-gasp effort to have the state’s miniscule property tax (0.25 mill) dedicated to the trauma system also breathed its last. That would have involved about $20 a year for the owner of a $200,000 home — already being paid but now going into the general slush fund instead of to a specific purpose.
It’s as though a patient were wheeled in with a severed arm and the only thing the General Assembly could think to do was say, “Put the arm in the freezer until we can find a surgeon to reattach it.”
Frankly, it is hard to grasp the rationale behind House Speaker Glenn Richardson’s apparent obstinacy on this one — if he wasn’t going to get the some sort of tax cut passed then he wasn’t going to grant any sort of addition or shift in taxes/fees for trauma care.
Even supporters of tax reform can grasp the notion that cutting taxes and saving lives have nothing to do with one another. In fact, if cutting taxes means consigning others (or themselves) to doom it is likely no supporter of such a “reform” exists.
IT’S ALREADY known that Georgia’s death rate for trauma victims is 20 percent higher than the national average and that if the state had sufficient sites and resources to just bring it up to the norm elsewhere then an estimated 700 lives a year would be saved.
“It’s a huge defeat for trauma [hospitals], but it’s also a huge defeat for every Georgian,” said Kevin Bloye of the Georgia Hospital Association. “We’re losing lives unnecessarily.” Obviously not a politician or he’d know that dead people can’t vote anyway — and that 700 wouldn’t be enough to swing most elections anyway.
OK, that’s a low blow but it’s deserved. No matter how peevish Richardson and pals might be at seeing grandiose plans for putting tax-cut proposals on the ballot in a year when they’ll all be standing for re-election, there’s no excuse of this.
Not only are the too-few trauma centers (15 in the state, only four at Level I that can deal with anything) but they’re hemorrhaging money. It’s reached the point where, for many, these 24/7 operations not only don’t pay for themselves (everybody must be treated) but the hospital profit centers can’t cover the costs.
PERHAPS IT IS easy for some legislators to turn away from offering government assistance in a life-and-death situation, but it is heart-wrenching for medical professionals to be faced with doing the same for actual human beings in dire need. And that, probably sooner than later, will be the result if this financial aspect isn’t quickly resolved.
If Georgia is really too broke to provide for such a fundamental need then it is plainly way too broke to even be talking about tax cuts. If Georgia isn’t that broke, then it must be spending a whole lot of money on the wrong things. Is luring fishing tourists more important? Are local pork projects or legislative junkets? Come to think of it, should members of the General Assembly even have a state-paid pension fund if the money going there might instead be used to pick up bleeding bodies from the side of the road?
Choices this obvious are not rocket science — heck, they’re not even political science.
Providing solid, permanent funding to at least sustain the existing trauma care (when more is obviously needed) falls into the category of what’s known as a no-brainer.
HENCE, THE ONLY politicians who would fail to do something this obvious must fall into the category of having no brains. If this were Oz, and Georgia increasingly looks like a place not in contact with reality, the Tinman would chime in: “And no heart, either!”
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