Category: News

With the Mississippi legislature’s next regular session less than two weeks away, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann laid out a number of priorities he’d like to see pass in 2023. Atop his list were healthcare and infrastructure, with education and taxes also being mentioned during a meeting with news media Wednesday. Hosemann, who leads the state Senate, said people often have preconceptions about legislative sessions during election years. State offices, including his own, will be up for grabs in November.

The state of Mississippi isn’t getting anything past Danielle Thomas. Thomas is a bright, young single mother raising her six kids in south Jackson. Because she lives in poverty, Thomas is also an expert in the convoluted policies and bureaucratic red tape surrounding one of the biggest scandals in state history: the TANF program. Despite recent attention on the graft and corruption within the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant, Mississippi is still pumping less than 5% of the money directly to mothers like Thomas. “I really think it’s still them stealing from people, to be honest,” Thomas, 34, said. “I really feel like they feel like a lot of us aren’t smart enough, or they feel like we probably don’t know the system in and out well enough.”

Gov. Tate Reeves has joined with 24 other states to ask President Joe Biden to end the Federal Public Health Emergency for COVID-19, which would allow the state to remove some people from Medicaid coverage.  First declared in January 2020 under the Trump Administration, the public health emergency gives health care providers flexibility in how they operate. This public health emergency has been extended repeatedly since — it was last extended again in October and set to end in January 2023, though the department has not indicated it will not renew. The department has said it will give governors at least 60 days notice before a declaration ends.

The State of Mississippi is leaving millions of dollars on the table that could directly benefit families in deep poverty, witnesses emphasized repeatedly during a public hearing Thursday before the Mississippi House and Senate Democratic caucuses. LaDonna Pavetti, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted that the accumulated unspent Temporary Assistance For Needy Families (TANF) funds could be used to assist low-income families with children in any given year. “The important takeaway here is that Mississippi has TANF funds available to provide extra cash,” Pavetti said. “The last report, which was for 2020, (showed) that Mississippi had $47 million in unspent TANF funds. Those are funds that are just sitting (where) Mississippi can draw on them any time it wants … and in 2020, Mississippi left $31 million unspent. It’s just sitting there.”

The state of Mississippi was entering a new day in the fight against poverty.  At least that’s what conservative talk radio station SuperTalk would have you believe. It was the summer of 2018, and radio host Paul Gallo was visiting with John Davis, then-director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services, and nonprofit founder Nancy New on site during a government summit at the Westin luxury hotel in downtown Jackson.

Extending postpartum Medicaid, creating a foster care bill of rights and building a new website to help moms and families find resources are all among the policy priorities backed by the Senate Study Group on Women, Children and Families, Sen. Nicole Boyd, R-Oxford, told Mississippi Today. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann tasked the group with reviewing the needs of Mississippi families and children from birth to age 3, following the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that allowed the state’s near-total abortion ban to take effect. The ban will result in an estimated 5,000 additional births each year, a 14% increase in the state with the country’s highest rates of infant mortality and preterm births; a foster care system in which children are often abused and neglected; and the most restrictive Medicaid policies for new moms in the country.

Mississippi’s largest health insurance provider is finally covering patients in-network at the state’s largest medical complex again after the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Mississippi announced an agreement. Since last spring, thousands of non-emergency patients have not been able to get affordable care at UMMC due to an ongoing dispute with BCBS. “Effective December 15, 2022, all UMMC facilities, physicians and other individual Professional Providers are fully participating Network Providers for all Blue Cross commercial health plans, including the Federal Employee Plan and Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans from other states,” says Friday’s joint statement. “Blue Cross and UMMC remain focused on their missions of serving Mississippians’ health care needs.”

As the Mississippi health care crisis worsens and threatens to imminently shutter hospitals in the Mississippi Delta, the state Department of Health is taking steps to prepare for the impending disaster. The Mississippi State Department of Health, an agency that has been gutted by budget cuts and weakened services over the past decade, was not staffed nor funded to take on the full burden of replacing health care services lost if hospitals close. But State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney recently told lawmakers the department, in anticipation of an increase of health care deserts in the Delta, has begun assessing how it can help.

Larger regional hospitals in Mississippi – where the sickest patients often get their care – are full, and state health officials are begging Mississippians to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and the flu to protect themselves and the health care system. “It’s the inability to transfer (patients) to a higher level of care – our Level 1 and Level 2 hospitals are really being swamped,” State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney said Thursday. “… We’ve been having a lot of transfers go out of state.”  Hospitals in neighboring states are also in similar situations and not able to accept transfers. As of noon on Thursday, some hospitals in Tennessee were not accepting transfers, said Jim Craig, senior deputy and director of health protection at the Mississippi State Department of Health.

Hospital revenue has declined slightly since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, but doctors say the major source of economic distress in the healthcare field is rising costs. Staffing, transportation, food and other essential services hospitals must provide have all been affected by inflation or shortages, and experts say those costs may not recede any time soon. “It’s kind of been a domino effect over the past two-and-a-half to three years,” says Dr. John Cross, President of the Mississippi State Medical Association. He says small hospitals across the state are strained. “Medicare has cut some of their reimbursement rates, Mississippi Medicaid has been forced to cut some of their reimbursement rates,” says Dr. Cross. “There’s increased numbers of uncompensated care, that’s uninsured patients that come in. And there’s even increased cost to the private paying patients. And so all these things have kinda all come together.” Many doctors and healthcare advocates have called on the state legislature to aid these hospitals through various avenues, with a major pathway being an expansion to Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Dr. Cross says that’s not the only option, and the state should be investigating ways to create sustainable and comprehensive healthcare in rural areas.