Evacuees' Access to Medicaid Eased

ATLANTA -- Health insurance help may be coming soon for evacuees from Hurricane Katrina.

Officials said Wednesday that a federal agency has given preliminary instructions to Georgia and other states to ease enrollment of evacuees into Medicaid, the insurance program for the poor and disabled.

Georgia is developing a plan to follow federal guidelines, said Julie Kerlin, spokeswoman for the state Department of Community Health.

It won't mean that all survivors will be automatically covered by Medicaid, officials said. But the eligibility process will be streamlined so that people who have lost their homes and jobs will be quickly accepted into the insurance program.

Medicaid beneficiaries from storm-ravaged states will get coverage in Georgia, and hospitals and others providing medical care will send bills for those services to the states where the patients lived.

Officials with the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said Wednesday that they're still working out details of the emergency policies.

At least 20 hospitals in metro Atlanta have treated Katrina survivors.

Payment for that treatment will come from a variety of sources.

If the patients were airlifted from Gulf Coast hospitals through the National Disaster Medical System, the federal government will pay for their health services, said Kevin Bloye, a spokesman for the Georgia Hospital Association.

Other patients have their usual insurance coverage -- or lack of it. "We suspect a fairly high number of evacuees are uninsured, and the hospitals will end up bearing the cost of that care unless the federal government elects to reimburse hospitals for those costs," Bloye said.

Georgia has not been named a "public health emergency state" by the federal government -- a designation that would help pay for medical treatment for evacuees, the GHA said.

"As you look at this population, they're going to be needing medications for hypertension, diabetes, mental illness," said Vi Naylor, executive vice president of the GHA.

Also on Wednesday, a top Georgia public health official warned that treating Katrina's victims on top of metro Atlanta's perennially packed emergency rooms may finally break the system.

"I'm concerned about trying to protect a fairly fragile emergency response system that is already, on occasion, on the verge of collapse," said Dr. Patrick O'Neal, medical director of Georgia's Division of Public Health emergency medical and trauma services.

O'Neal voiced his concerns to hospital and state officials meeting to address long-term response to Hurricane Katrina survivors.

Tuesday night, seven hospitals were too full to accept certain kinds of emergency patients, such as those needing cardiac care or orthopedic surgery.

People needing that kind of treatment were diverted, when possible, to other hospitals. Grady Memorial Hospital, Atlanta Medical Center and North Fulton Regional Hospital continued to try to divert patients Wednesday to other facilities.

Andy Miller writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. E-mail: jamiller@ajc.com. Staff writer Patricia Guthrie contributed to this article.