After SC coronavirus death data, some call for more health care for state’s poor

Various state and local officials said Thursday they would like to see S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster consider accepting more Medicaid money from the federal government so more low income South Carolinians would have better access to health care services.

Upgraded health care would enable low-income people — who often have heart, diabetes or weight conditions that make them especially vulnerable to coronavirus — to better survive the pandemic, they said.

“”You have people who are in poor health from the beginning, and a lot of them are in poor health because they have no great health care. They only go to doctors in emergencies, when the pain or the situation becomes unbearable,” said State Sen. Darrell Jackson, D-Richland, the ranking minority member of the Senate Medical Affairs Committee.

“What this COVID-19 has exposed is that health care is horrible in this state,” Jackson said. “When you deny basically free health care from people — the government was saying, ‘Here, come take this’ — and we didn’t. And now it is coming back to haunt us.”

The requests by Jackson and others come one day after the S.C. Department of Environmental Health and Control released statistics showing that African Americans, who make up 27% of South Carolina’s population, account for 46% of the 63 coronavirus deaths in the state, as of Thursday.

Those numbers are based on a relatively small sample, but they mirror data from other states and cities — such as Detroit, Louisiana and Chicago — that show that African Americans have been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus.

Only about 14 states have refused to accept hundreds of millions in Medicaid aid to expand access to more

low-income people, whose basic medical care including testing and treatment of COVID-19 would be paid for, according to a position paper by the Columbia-based Appleseed Legal Justice Center. Medicaid is a public health insurance program for low-income people.

Giving states more Medicaid money for the low-income to expand treatment was part of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and is generally unpopular in conservative Republican states, such as South Carolina. For every $1 million the state puts up, it would receive back $9 million in federal funds. More than 300,000 low income South Carolinians, white and black, would be eligible for health care coverage, Jackson estimated.

Asked for comment, McMaster spokesman Brian Symmes said Thursday, “These new (death) statistics are nothing short of shocking and extremely sad. The bottom line is every life is precious, regardless of what you look like or where you come from.

“This certainly isn’t the time for politics or trying to advance a political ideology,” Symmes said, adding it is an “unfortunate truth” that states that have accepted Medicaid expansion are seeing the same sort of “discrepancies that we are seeing here as far as it (coronavirus) affects African Americans.”

Asked if his statement meant that McMaster would perhaps later be open to expanding Medicaid, Symmes said, “I think what you heard me do is be unwilling to get into a conversation about partisan politics or advancing political ideologies in the midst of a crisis.”

South Carolina is not the only state where people are pushing officials to accept the Medicaid expansion funds. Citizens in Florida, Kansas and Missouri are also urging their state governments not to pass up free federal money.

A DHEC official said Thursday afternoon on a conference call with news reporters to discuss coronavirus-related matters that her agency is doing everything it can to get better health care out to rural and low income people.

“In an effort to reach the different communities who are at high risk from having severe illness from this disease, we are working with state and local partners, both public and private,” said DHEC’s Dr. Brannon Traxler, a physician.

“This work includes churches to help communicate prevention messaging,” she said, adding DHEC is looking for more ways to “to further inform those who are at higher risk. So, if you are a pastor or community business leader and want to help us ... please reach out to us.”

Traxler said one theory about why African Americans have more “bad outcomes” with the coronavirus is that they lack full access to health care and they have more underlying conditions that “predispose you to bad outcomes with COVID-19.”

Asked if she had an opinion on whether it would be good to get Medicaid to help get more health care to the state’s poor of if South Carolina should continue to reject the money, Traxler said, “I am trained in medicine, not even health care economics. But I would say that I support any method of getting good health care to folks .... we really want to decrease the disparities.”

Medicaid would enable many low-income people to make regular visits to doctors, where they could not only get treatment but also learn better health care prevention techniques, Jackson said.

Earlier this week, State Rep. Pat Henegan, D-Marlboro, was one of several leaders urging DHEC to release more data pertaining to race in coronavirus-related matters. Asked if she would be in favor of McMaster seeking more Medicaid money, Henegan said, “I am 150 percent behind it.”

Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin said he is in favor of expanding Medicaid in this crisis time. “Prayerfully, this will serve as a rallying cry for a lot of folks.”

This story was originally published April 9, 2020 at 6:52 PM.