Rural areas - already short on health resources - face enrollment hitches

With enrollment assistance resources so strapped, it will be hard to reach out to rural consumers. “We had a booth at the PRIDE festival in Atlanta last Sunday, and someone said, ‘Why are y’all even here? Isn’t Obamacare dead?’” Ammons said. “And if they think that in Atlanta, you can only imagine what they think in south Georgia.”Health economist William Custer, who teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta, echoed those fears about increases in the number of uninsured in rural Georgia.The effects of less insurance will be felt hard in those areas, he explained. Nearly half of the state’s counties, most of them in rural areas, do not have an OB-GYN. Seven hospitals in rural Georgia have closed within the past four years. Several have closed their labor and delivery units. If people in rural Georgia lose insurance rather than gain it, efforts made in recent years by state leaders to stanch financial bleeding at rural hospitals could be jeopardized, Custer said.“This is really the big worry. The problem in Georgia is that we have very different geographics, very different demographics and very different health care. These changes this year really seem to be pushing us even more to two Georgias,” Custer said.