When he asks hospital executives if Medicaid expansion would help their balance sheets, he said, “they say it’s a game changer.” Of the state’s hospitals, “I have maybe heard of two that are generating any profit,” he said. But he predicted emerging health care deserts where women would have to travel long distances to deliver babies and more sick people would die because they could not gain access to care. Edney, the state’s top health officer, said he did not set Medicaid policy, and he has been careful not to take sides. About the same percentage live in poverty, a rate three times the national average.ĭr. More than 300,000 people live here, nearly 35% of them Black. Yet in Mississippi’s Delta, a flat swath of fields of corn, soybeans and other crops nearly as big as Delaware, access to any kind of medical care is drying up for lack of money. “I believe we should be working to get people off Medicaid as opposed to adding more people to it,” said Philip Gunn, the powerful Republican House speaker. Opponents also argue that the newly insured would become dependent on Medicaid and therefore be less likely to work. “Don’t simply cave under the pressure of Democrats and their allies in the media who are pushing for the expansion of Obamacare, welfare and socialized medicine,” Reeves said in his annual State of the State address in January. The governor says the state’s $3.9 billion surplus would be best used to help eliminate Mississippi’s income tax. Tate Reeves, a Republican, and key GOP state lawmakers argue that a bigger Mississippi program is not in taxpayers’ best interest. In Mississippi, more than half are Black. Three in five are adults of color, according to a 2021 study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonprofit research group. The same is true for close to 2 million other Americans who live in the states that have not expanded Medicaid. Many of the ineligible are also too poor to qualify for the tax credits for insurance under the Affordable Care Act, leaving them without affordable options. John Lucas, a Greenwood Leflore surgeon.Īmong Mississippi adults, only disabled people and parents with extremely low incomes, along with most pregnant women, are eligible for Medicaid. “I can tell you I have a number of patients who are on dialysis with renal failure for the rest of their life because they couldn’t afford the medication for their blood pressure, and that caused their kidneys to go bad,” said Dr. Health officials blame those numbers in part on the high rate of uninsured residents who miss out on preventive care.
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