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Add Delta Council to the list of people and organizations that have looked at the numbers and concluded that expanding Medicaid is the overwhelmingly sensible thing for Mississippi to do.
Unfortunately, being sensible has not been a priority for the Republican leadership at the Capitol, especially Gov. Tate Reeves and House Speaker Philip Gunn. They have repeatedly rejected any efforts to expand the government insurance program to cover the working poor simply because of its association with Obamacare. In this past session alone, according to Mississippi Today’s count, at least eight Medicaid expansion proposals died in committee without a hearing. Even a very modest expansion — extending Mississippi’s postpartum care for new mothers from two months to 12 — could not get past Gunn’s stubborn opposition after passing the Senate with bipartisan support.
The arguments Delta Council makes in the resolution its Education and Health Committee unanimously adopted last week are not new.
Those arguments have been made for years in Mississippi by Democratic lawmakers, hospitals, health advocacy groups and several news media outlets, including the Commonwealth.
The significance of Delta Council joining the chorus is that it is considered a relatively conservative, pro-business organization, whose 19-county membership probably skews heavily Republican. It is the type of group that, at least in the past, had the ear of state leaders.
Delta Council’s support for expansion relies heavily on the abundance of research, including by Mississippi’s own government economists, that says Medicaid expansion will pay for itself through increased economic activity, reduced levels of uncompensated care and the cost-shifting of current state health care costs onto the federal government. Rather than the false claim repeatedly made by Reeves and Gunn that Mississippi would lose money if it expands Medicaid, these studies show the opposite: namely, the state would make money because of the extremely generous share the federal government pays for Medicaid expansion and the economic spinoffs that the roughly billion dollars a year of new funding coming into the state would generate.
Delta Council also is sensitive to what it has been hearing from hospitals in the heavily rural region, several of which may not survive if something is not done to change their current financial dynamics. Medicaid expansion is not, as Delta Council’s resolution states, a cure-all for these hospitals, but it will help them significantly by reducing the amount of uncompensated care they are currently having to swallow.
The lack of health insurance not only puts the working poor and the hospitals that serve them at risk. As Wade Litton, a Greenwood businessman and Delta Council leader, points out, it also hurts people who have private insurance and the employers that foot the majority of the cost for that insurance.
By law, hospitals cannot turn away patients, regardless of their ability to pay. When hospitals have a large percentage of patients who are uninsured, those hospitals have to try to make up the losses somewhere. About the only place they can is by charging more to their private-pay patients, which drives up the insurance premiums for these patients and their employers.
Mississippi remains one of just 12 states in the country that have declined to expand Medicaid. The other 38 and the District of Columbia are more than happy to allow Mississippi taxpayers to help pay for a benefit that this state is not receiving.
Maybe Delta Council will have better luck than others have had in convincing the state’s GOP leadership that this is idiocy.
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