Top Georgia Democrats have chastised Gov. Brian Kemp’s signature health care program for low-income Georgians, with Jon Ossoff, the state’s senior U.S. senator, calling it “an embarrassment.”
The criticism by Ossoff and his colleague in the U.S. Senate, Raphael Warnock, as well as state Senate Minority Leader Harold Jones II, follow fresh disclosures of scant participation and wasteful spending in “Pathways to Coverage,” Kemp’s highly touted experimental alternative to the federal government’s Medicaid program for low-income Georgians.
Those disclosures, contained in an in-depth look of the program by The Current and ProPublica, show that the project had cost the state’s taxpayers more than $86 million as of the end of 2024, three-quarters of which went to consultants.
Furthermore, only 6,500 people enrolled in the first 18 months of the program — roughly 75% fewer than the state had estimated for the project’s first year, according to the report’s findings.
Ossoff said Kemp’s long-standing refusal to expand Medicaid has already limited access to health care in the state and further cuts under discussion in Washington would only make the situation worse. Medicaid currently provides health care to nearly 2 million low-income Georgians.
“I am sounding the alarm that these proposed drastic cuts to Medicaid will fundamentally damage the health and safety of my constituents in Georgia,” he said. “It will put kids at risk, pregnant women, and delivering mothers at risk, seniors in nursing homes at risk, and hospitals across our state into dire financial jeopardy.”
In Georgia, 46% of all births are paid for by Medicaid, and approximately 70% of elderly Georgians in nursing homes pay via Medicaid.
Warnock singled out for criticism the fees paid to the program’s consultants.
“I’ve spent years urging state leaders to expand Medicaid, even helping secure $1.2 billion in additional incentives for the state to help hundreds of thousands of Georgians who are left without the health coverage they need, but instead taxpayer dollars are being routed into the pockets of consultants,” Warnock said in a statement to The Current.
“Georgia shamefully has one of the highest uninsured rates, one of the worst maternal mortality rates, and ranks 38th in life expectancy—it doesn’t have to be like this.” I still believe we can find a bipartisan path to getting this done, and I will continue working in the U.S. Senate to make health care more affordable for Georgians.”
At a news conference at the capitol last month, Kemp hailed Pathways, the only state health-care program for low-income Americans with a work requirement.
“We are not only keeping families healthy together during a critical time of development,” Kemp said, “but also making an important investment in our state’s future.”
What the governor did not acknowledge, and the report showed, is that Pathways is not achieving two primary goals: enrolling people in health care and getting them to work, according to the findings by The Current and ProPublica.
That conclusion was confirmed recently by an independent evaluation commissioned by the state and disclosed to The Current, which the Kemp administration has yet to release publicly.
Jones, the Democrats’ Senate minority leader in Atlanta, said the state is “wasting money” on Pathways, which he described as a “job program,” not a health care initiative.
“They’re dealing, basically, with whether you’re working or not,” he said.
Equally dismaying, Jones said, was Kemp’s misleading use of data to illustrate the program’s supposed progress. He described as “problematic” that the governor would “sit up there and basically not be truthful as far as what the real numbers of Pathways are.”
