Kudos to Representative Missy McGee, House Medicaid Committee Chair (District 102, Hattiesburg) for her courageous and persistent leadership for Medicaid expansion this legislative session. Despite her efforts and those of House Speaker Jason White (District 48, West) and many others, the legislation failed.
A coalition of faith-based groups and healthcare organizations pushed hard for the legislation: Together for Hope, Working Together Mississippi, Care4MS, the American Cancer Society, Cancer Action Network and the American Heart Association.
Even the Mississippi Economic Council, the Mississippi Manufacturers Association, and the Business and Industry Political Education Committee voiced their support, saying “Access to healthcare . . . means a healthier population, a healthier work force and an improved quality of life, all of which contribute to stronger Mississippi communities” (Mississippi Today, April 16, 2024).
Thanks to Lt. Governor Delbert Hosemann, Medicaid expansion did not come to Mississippians this year. He had help of course, from his Senate colleagues including Medicaid Committee Chair, Kevin Blackwell (District 19, Southaven) and Medicaid Committee Vice-Chair, Nicole Boyd (District 9, Oxford). As for Governor Reeves, he is still haunted by Ronald Reagan’s outmoded “welfare queen” mentality and thinks expanded Medicaid is just another welfare program.
The Republican-controlled Senate insisted on a 25 hour per week work requirement to be eligible for coverage. Forty other states have expanded Medicaid, and none of those, including 12 Republican-controlled legislatures, includes a work requirement.
Why would Hoseman and Company want to include a work requirement? Good question. Republicans are not clamoring for work requirements for all those agricultural programs designed to make sure our nation can produce all the food and fiber that we need to prosper. Those millions of dollars in payments to Mississippi farmers each year support a national consensus, a national policy actually, that is designed to protect the land for the good of us all.
Why then can’t Republican Party leaders support a policy that protects the state’s most precious resource, the health of its citizens? I believe that the state has a responsibility to protect and nurture that resource. One reason is that we have chosen to live under a capitalist system.
My Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition, defines capitalism like this: “an economic system characterized [1] by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, [2] by investments that are determined by private decision, and [3] by prices, production and distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market” (p. 183).
The last line may be the most important one, for it contains the word “competition.” Any system based on competition automatically creates winners and losers. Over time, a capitalist system creates a segment of its citizens who reside at the bottom of the heap economically. For whatever good or bad reasons, they have not competed successfully.
I believe that our commitment to a capitalist system obligates us to create a robust safety net for those at the bottom of the income ladder. Their poverty is partly our responsibility because our consensus as a nation is to prioritize competition as the bedrock of our economy. The rest of us have a moral responsibility to help those at the bottom make a life under an otherwise unforgiving system.
In the end, it may have been simple political inertia that sunk Medicaid expansion. As the Governor said, expanding Medicaid “goes against the principles of our party and the tried and true economic principles that built the greatest country in the history of mankind” (Mississippi Today, May 3, 2024). Apparently one of those principles is to perpetuate the conditions that have made Mississippi the poorest and most unhealthy state in the nation. Mississippi Republicans have failed Mississippi.
What a shame. For the poor of Mississippi and for all the citizens in the state that will continue to lead the nation in the worst health indicators and whose rural hospitals will continue to shrink or close. Thank you, Delbert. You could have fought the good fight, and even if you’d lost, you’d have come out a winner. But you didn’t.
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Dick Conville is a professor of communication studies (ret.) and long-time resident of Hattiesburg. He can be reached at rlconville@yahoo.com.
