By Carolyn Badaracco
As every state in the U.S. grapples with the issue of healthcare, Georgia has its own dilemma. It is a towering colossus that keeps state legislators and constituents up at night. The issue’s effects on people are challenging enough on their own, but the problem of what to do about healthcare bleeds into the state organism as a whole.
“It’s not just about physical health. When you don’t have a healthy workforce, how do you get people to go to work?” asked State Rep. Kim Schofield of District 63, which encompasses parts of Fulton County, the cities of East Point, College Park, Hapeville, and other areas surrounding Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Schofield, who sits on the House Committee on Public and Community Health, reports feeling her constituents’ pain.
“I’ve lived with lupus for 26 years,” she said. “Therefore, healthcare is primary on my agenda every single day I wake up. So I think about not just access to affordable healthcare, but to make sure that people with chronic diseases are attended to properly and brought to the forefront.”
Schofield concedes, “We do some things well, but when Georgia remains at the bottom of the list when it comes to maternal mortality, and we have not fully funded Medicaid, and we have the closing of rural hospitals, along with a loss of key, critical primary care doctors and critical doctors … we are looking for ways to recruit and retain.”
So, for Georgia, affordable healthcare and also accessible healthcare are of keen interest to people across the state.
“It’s not just in my district—I don’t believe healthcare is a Democrat or Republican issue,” Schofield said. “It’s not a rural, urban or suburban issue. It is a people issue. And we have healthcare deserts.”
Georgia State Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick is vice chair of the Senate Committee on Health and Human Services and chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Children and Families. She also cites lack of healthcare services in rural communities and a shortage of doctors across the state as key issues affecting Georgians heading into 2026.
“The Governor mentioned in his State of the State Address —and the Speaker of the House mentioned it too—that graduate medical education is getting a great deal of attention in Georgia,” Kirkpatrick said. “Because research shows that where doctors do their postgraduate training, their residency training, has a lot to do with where they stay and practice.”
Georgia is naturally well-stocked in institutions for the study of medicine. Emory University School of Medicine and Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta; Mercer University School of Medicine in Savannah, Macon and Columbus; and the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University in Augusta are some of them.
Fitting hand-in-glove, Georgia was notified after the annual legislative session of the Georgia General Assembly kicked off on January 12, 2026, that it is getting some $200 million from the federal government for rural hospital development, Kirkpatrick reports.
“It’s an infusion of funds that is sorely needed, and this is big news for Georgia,” she says. “There’s a proposal in the works right now for where that money should go.”
A scarcity of pharmacies in Georgia is another concern noted by both legislators, and then there’s the double-punch of prescription prices.
“I’m hearing from people who are riding over 40 minutes to get to a pharmacy,” Schofield said. “I think about seniors who are on a limited budget, and they should not have to worry about choosing between paying the light bill or buying their medicine.”
Once again, Schofield explained Medicaid cuts exacerbate this issue in underserved and under-resourced communities.
In any industry, when problems mount, solutions sometimes appear in unexpected places and in unexpected ways. Schofield finds this to be the case in Georgia’s healthcare system.
“I’ve been working on food-as-medicine programs for quite some time. It hasn’t gotten a hearing, but let’s look at some options,” she noted.
Schofield believes the arts, too, can be a form of intervention for healing,
“While that’s not going to stop your disease, it could relieve some of the need for you to see a doctor if you’re dealing with mental health, for example,” Schofield said. “Similarly, socially engaging activities can help alleviate psychological issues.”
Mental health in Georgia is also on Kirkpatrick’s radar, and she reports that Georgia is struggling with the issue as much as the entire country.
“It’s a continuing saga that is linked with a lot of other things, homelessness and incarceration among them,’ Kirkpatrick said. “So we’ve created programs with co-responder teams between law enforcement and behavioral health professionals.”
Kirkpatrick continued, “We’ve also passed legislation on parity for mental health services as compared to physical health treatments.”
Georgia’s insurance commissioner reportedly issued some $25 million in fines in early January for insurers that were not following mental health parity rules.
Kirkpatrick is also working on early diagnosis and treatment of autism in Georgia’s children.
“The earlier the screening and treatment takes place, the better kids do,” she said, so the Children and Families Committee is working to expand a pilot program and increase access to autism screening.
Health insurance is a beast all its own that Georgians are fighting. Insurance rates—not just healthcare but all kinds of insurance—have gone through the roof, Kirkpatrick added.
“We’ve even had businesses leaving our state because of it. And so last year, with a lot of work, we were able to pass two significant bills on lawsuit reform in Georgia,” she continued.
Although unpopular with the trial bar, Kirkpatrick contends “this is already showing dividends, and some of the rates are going down just a little.”
Kirkpatrick said Georgia is tackling other important healthcare concerns, as well—with the Georgia Access marketplace that allows people to get private health insurance with subsidies.
“The idea being to get people off Medicaid and onto insurance that’s more widely accepted in doctors’ offices and [facilities],” she said. “But now, with what the feds are doing … it’s certainly going to impact the states, and they’re taking a lot of expenses back to the states. So we’re in the middle of that, and no one knows how that’s going to end.”
Carolyn Badaracco is a senior writer and editor whose work has appeared in Atlanta Business Chronicle, American City & County, Midwest Real Estate News, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, National Real Estate Investor (Wealth Management Real Estate), and the American Institute of Architects’ publications. She is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism who has called Atlanta home for 30 years.
