ATLANTA — Gov. Brian Kemp said Thursday that Georgia has been given the "green light" to establish a state health insurance exchange following on legislation to begin the processing of creating one he signed into law last year.
"Last year I proposed and signed critical legislation allowing us to establish a state-based exchange," Gov. Kemp wrote on X. "Today, we received the green light which will allow us to grow our promotion efforts and make it easier to get even more Georgians covered through a wider range of options."
The governor's post did not go into details on the approval process or what timeline might exist going forward for when the state exchange could go into operation.
In 2023 the law, SB 65, directed the Georgia Commissioner of Insurance to "establish any advisory board or committee the Commissioner deems necessary for providing recommendations on the creation, implementation or operation of an exchange."
Several states run their own exchanges under the umbrella of the ACA, among them California and New York. Georgia had at one point sought a slightly different path -- attempting to establish its own private healthcare marketplace outside the architecture of the ACA.
In a long saga through which those plans ultimately withered, Georgia had received a waiver from the Trump administration to go ahead with before the Biden administration later took office and revoked it.
According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, more than 879,000 people in Georgia signed up for health insurance through the federal healthcare.gov insurance exchange for 2023.
Whitney Griggs, a health policy analyst with Georgians for a Healthy Future, told 11Alive last year that the move would help the state avoid paying billions of dollars per year in fees to use healthcare.gov.
"A state using a state-based marketplace can customize their outreach methods, their outreach documents, their navigator programs to meet the state's needs rather than using generalized materials and documents," Griggs said. "The state has realized they can save money on the user fees and repurpose that money for its customized outreach and resources to really make it Georgia-specific.”
Griggs added the rollouts in places like New York and California had been mostly successful, but noted a history of several people being dropped from their health insurance coverage when transitions occurred.