Mississippi Today

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards: Medicaid expansion ‘easiest big decision I ever made’

Published

2 years ago

August 24, 2023

Two-term Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards calls expanding Medicaid as he took office in 2016 “the easiest big decision I have ever made” — and one that has had clear and convincing positive results for Louisianans.

“To me it was an obvious no-brainer, and maybe it’s easier for me to say that than others because I believe in making government work,” Edwards said in a recent interview with Mississippi Today. “I don’t believe in just saying, ‘Well, we just don’t want to expand government.’ Quite frankly, I don’t expect St. Peter to ask that question one day: Did you expand government? But I do expect him to ask what I did for the least fortunate among us.”

Louisiana, like other states nationwide, was at the time facing a health care crisis. It led the nation in rates of uninsured people — 22%-23%, mostly the “working poor.”

“We had many hospitals, especially rural hospitals, that were in danger of closing when I became governor,” Edwards said. “But because we have expanded Medicaid, we have not lost a single one.

“I’m not going to try to tell you that it fixed all of our problems and that all of a sudden we have the best health outcomes in the country,” Edwards continued. “What I can tell you is it addressed our most pressing problems, and it has created an environment where we can more easily produce better health outcomes because you just have more people with the ability to go to a doctor.”

Edwards said that when he became governor of Louisiana in 2016, the politics of Medicaid expansion "were probably about the same" as they are now in neighboring Mississippi, and so was the dire health care situation. He would unequivocally recommend Mississippi leaders take advantage of the federal program designed to help poor states with health care.

Edwards notes the politics on expansion have changed in Louisiana.

"In Louisiana we have a gubernatorial campaign underway, and I don't believe there is a single major candidate of either party who says anything other than they will leave the Medicaid expansion in place."

Mississippi Today interviewed the term-limited Gov. Edwards on Medicaid expansion as the end of his term nears, on a policy he says "ranks at the very top" of his accomplishments. The interview is below, edited for brevity.

Mississippi Today: Could you give a brief/broad overview of the situation when you took office, and of the impact Medicaid expansion has had in Louisiana since 2016.

Gov. John Bel Edwards: First, I'll talk about the impact it's had on our overall state budget. Secondly, individuals and families — many for the first time — have health insurance. And thirdly, we saw positive impact on the financial bottom line of hospitals across our state.

When I became governor, we had the largest general fund budget deficit in our state's history. It exceeded $2 billion for the first full fiscal year that started July 1, 2016, and that was a little more than 20% of all our state general fund. And that deficit occurred after several years of leading the nation in cuts to higher education, and cuts to basic health care delivery systems in our state.

And the cuts were just horrible with respect to Medicaid ... You have optional programs, but the optional programs were like hospice, end-stage renal disease care — things that most people would never consider optional, like things that would impact a person's ability to stay in a nursing home.

The people who were caught uninsured were working poor people. The poorest of the poor qualified for Medicaid. Those who worked and made enough money had private insurance or employer sponsored insurance. Working poor people were left out of that equation, and our uninsured rate among working aged adults was the highest in the country, around 22%-23%.

If someone is uninsured and they have access to any health care, it's likely to be an emergency room, which is the most costly way to receive health care. It's also the least effective way to manage disease ... That care either went totally uncompensated by the health care provider, meaning they had to pay for its themselves, or it might have been compensated in part by the (federal-state Disproportionate Share Hospitals) program.

But the DiSH program costs the state about 40 cents on the dollar. Medicaid expansion has never cost more than 10 cents on the dollar, and in Louisiana, the 10 cents is actually borne by the health care providers themselves because the hospitals realized their bottom lines would benefit so much that they assessed themselves.

This has produced an awful lot of compensation for these hospitals. Their bottom line is so much better — and this is all hospitals, our community hospitals, our very large hospitals like Ochsner, like Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady, like Children's Hospitals of New Orleans. But also, and I suspect most importantly, rural hospitals, because they were the ones struggling the most just to keep their doors open and routinely cutting programs and reducing staff to stay afloat.

We were able to address all of that through the Medicaid expansion, and it helped our state budget tremendously. My predecessor said he refused to expand Medicaid because we couldn't afford it. The truth is we couldn't afford not to do it. It actually helped our bottom line and allowed us to shore up the financing of our hospitals.

But it also helped these working poor people because many of them for the first time in their lives had an insurance card in their pockets ... As the medical community here has told me many times, it saved a lot of lives here in Louisiana ... I believe that Medicaid expansion is a pro-life position.

MT: Did Louisiana see an increase in gross domestic product from Medicaid expansion?

Edwards: We had GDP gains. I can't say it's because of Medicaid expansion or that it's responsible for X percentage of that, but I can tell you we have had the highest personal income ever. We have had the lowest unemployment rates ever and we have had the most people working ever. We have had tremendous growth in our GDP, and I just intuitively know it helped.

... By getting away from all that uncompensated care and the matching payments we had to put up, and because hospitals assessed themselves to cover the 10% costs, we were then able to use the budget savings and the money we had to address other pressing concerns that we inherited after a long period of disinvestment in our state. It allowed us to invest in other critical priorities.

MT: How has expansion affected Louisiana’s workforce?

Edwards: So, you have a relationship with a primary care physician. You have routine appointments and diagnostic evaluations, breast cancer screenings, prostate cancer screenings ... Your disease gets diagnosed earlier. Your treatment starts sooner, and it comes with a prescription benefit, so you have a way to be healthier. You're a more productive worker. You're less likely to be laid off. You're more likely to be able to support your family. That business has a healthier employee who shows up to work more often and is more productive — and the business didn't have to pay for it.

I’ve had employers tell me they had good employees, but they weren’t necessarily healthy. They had a disease. They didn’t have health insurance, so they had to miss work to go and wait around an emergency room. They would have to call in sick more often. These employers benefit from having a healthier, more productive workforce that doesn’t come at their expense.

When you expand Medicaid for the working poor, you also work with the health care providers so that they don’t just have appointments 9-5 Monday through Friday, but you work with them so they have appointments after hours during the week, have places they can go on the weekends so that they don’t have to miss work in order to access basic care.

Now we have the advent of telehealth, which can be covered through the Medicaid program and allow them to see doctors and even specialists without having to travel. That is particularly onerous for poor people in rural areas that lack the resources and also are furthest away from the nearest physicians that they need to see.

MT: Has expansion had an impact on mental health and-or substance abuse?

Edwards: It comes with behavioral health benefits for mental health, and it also comes with benefits for those people who have addiction disorders, and those benefits both in patient and outpatient. That's clearly something we still don’t have enough of, but we have a lot more services available now than we ever did before.

MT: What is your take on Mississippi's battle over expanding Medicaid and its ongoing hospital/health care crisis? What advice would you give to Mississippi – particularly its politicians and leaders – on Medicaid expansion?

Edwards: I don’t think the whole time I have been governor I have addressed comments critical to another state or the leadership of another state. I will say the situation there, the one that I read about and the one that I know a little bit about firsthand — my wife is from Wayne County, Mississippi, and all of her family is still up there — it looks an awful lot like the situation we had here. The politics were probably about the same here.

... Here in Louisiana, we decided that decision was made by the federal government when they passed the Affordable Care Act — otherwise known as Obamacare — a feature of which was Medicaid expansion. So that decision was made by the Obama administration and the Congress at that time. It hasn’t been repealed, so it remains available to states, although not mandatory as it was originally intended. I believe that we should try to make government work for those who need it the most. The working poor people certainly need health care.

I believe that you should make available to your state federal programs that not only do that, but provide a benefit to your budget so that you can then have the flexibility to address other pressing concerns as well. We were able to do that here. Obviously the situation as it exists in Mississippi to the extent that I am familiar with it — I'm rather familiar — looks an awful lot like what we had here in Louisiana.

I would certainly recommend Medicaid expansion to the Legislature there, to the governor there, to the people who are running for governor there. I would recommend it to Gov. Reeves, to Brandon Presley and to everyone else.

MT: How is expansion viewed across the aisle now in Louisiana? What level of opposition remains there? Any chance Louisiana voters would go along with undoing expansion?

Edwards: Obviously people might expect me to give a full throated defense of Medicaid expansion. I was a champion of it while Gov. Jindal was in office and refused to do it. I ran for office saying I was going to do it, and I have since done it. I would just invite anybody to come over here and talk to the hospital association, talk to hospital medical directors and CEOs.

Go to the most rural isolated, poorest parts of our state ask them about Medicaid expansion, and then go talk to employers in those areas and see what a difference its made for them.

The opposition has just melted away here. It's virtually nonexistent. I think that’s borne out by the campaign that’s underway where not a single candidate says they would undo the Medicaid expansion, and it would be a perilous position for them to take in the campaign if they said that.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

Jackson’s performing arts venue Thalia Mara Hall is now open

Published

20 minutes ago

June 30, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-06-30 17:29:00

by Maya Miller, Mississippi Today
June 30, 2025

After more than 10 months closed due to mold, asbestos and issues with the air conditioning system, Thalia Mara Hall has officially reopened.

Outgoing Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba announced the reopening of Thalia Mara Hall during his final press conference held Monday on the arts venue’s steps.

“Today marks what we view as a full circle moment, rejoicing in the iconic space where community has come together for decades in the city of Jackson,” Lumumba said. “Thalia Mara has always been more than a venue. It has been a gathering place for people in the city of Jackson. From its first class ballet performances to gospel concerts, Thalia Mara Hall has been the backdrop for our city’s rich cultural history.”

Thalia Mara Hall closed last August after mold was found in parts of the building. The issues compounded from there, with malfunctioning HVAC systems and asbestos remediation. On June 6, the Mississippi State Fire Marshal’s Office announced that Thalia Mara Hall had finally passed inspection.

“We’re not only excited to have overcome many of the challenges that led to it being shuttered for a period of time,” Lumumba said. “We are hopeful for the future of this auditorium, that it may be able to provide a more up-to-date experience for residents, inviting shows that people are able to see across the world, bringing them here to Jackson. So this is an investment in the future.”

In total, Emad Al-Turk, a city contracted engineer and owner of Al-Turk Planning, estimates that $5 million in city and state funds went into bringing Thalia Mara Hall up to code.

The venue still has work to be completed, including reinstalling the fire curtain. The beam in which the fire curtain will be anchored has asbestos in it, so it will have to be remediated. In addition, a second air-conditioning chiller needs to be installed to properly cool the building. Until it’s installed, which could take months, Thalia Mara Hall will be operating at a lower seating capacity of about 800.

“Primarily because of the heat,” Al-Turk said. “The air conditioning would not be sufficient to actually accommodate the 2,000 people at full capacity, but starting in the fall, that should not be a problem.”

Al-Turk said the calendar is open for the city to begin booking events, though none have been scheduled for July.

“We’re very proud,” he said. “This took a little bit longer than what we anticipated, but we had probably seven or eight different contractors we had to coordinate with and all of them did a superb job to get us where we are today.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post Jackson’s performing arts venue Thalia Mara Hall is now open appeared first on mississippitoday.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

The article presents a straightforward report on the reopening of Thalia Mara Hall in Jackson, focusing on facts and statements from city officials without promoting any ideological viewpoint. The tone is neutral and positive, emphasizing the community and cultural significance of the venue while detailing the challenges overcome during renovations. The coverage centers on public investment and future prospects, without partisan framing or editorializing. While quotes from Mayor Lumumba and a city engineer highlight optimism and civic pride, the article maintains balanced, factual reporting rather than advancing a political agenda.

Mississippi Today

‘Hurdles waiting in the shadows’: Lumumba reflects on challenges and triumphs on final day as Jackson mayor

Published

5 hours ago

June 30, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @ayewolfe – 2025-06-30 17:08:00

by Anna Wolfe and Molly Minta, Mississippi Today
June 30, 2025

On his last day as mayor of Jackson, Chokwe Antar Lumumba recounted accomplishments, praised his executive team and said he has no plans to seek office again.

He spoke during a press conference outside of the city’s Thalia Mara Hall, which was recently cleared for reopening after nearly a year of remediation. The briefing, meant to give media members a peek inside the downtown theater, marked one of Lumumba’s final forays as mayor.

Longtime state Sen. John Horhn — who defeated Lumumba in the Democratic primary runoff — will be inaugurated as mayor Tuesday, but Lumumba won’t be present. Not for any contentious reason, the 42-year-old mayor noted, but because he returns to his private law practice Tuesday.

“I’ve got to work now, y’all,” Lumumba said. “I’ve got a job.”

Thalia Mara Hall’s presumptive comeback was a fitting end for Lumumba, who pledged to make Jackson the most radical city in America but instead spent much of his eight years in office parrying one emergency after another. The auditorium was built in 1968 and closed nearly 11 months ago after workers found mold caused by a faulty HVAC system – on top of broken elevators, fire safety concerns and vandalism.

“This job is a fast-pitched sport,” Lumumba said. “There’s an abundance of challenges that have to be addressed, and it seems like the moment that you’ve gotten over one hurdle, there’s another one that is waiting in the shadows.”

Outside the theater Monday, Lumumba reflected on the high points of his leadership instead of the many crises — some seemingly self-inflicted — he faced as mayor.

He presided over the city during the coronavirus pandemic and the rise in crime it brought, but also the one-two punch of the 2021 and 2022 water crises, exacerbated by the city’s mismanagement of its water plants, and the 18-day pause in trash pickup spurred by Lumumba’s contentious negotiations with the city council in 2023.

Then in 2024, Lumumba was indicted alongside other city and county officials in a sweeping federal corruption probe targeting the proposed development of a hotel across from the city’s convention center, a project that has remained stalled in a 20-year saga of failed bids and political consternation.

Slated for trial next year, Lumumba has repeatedly maintained his innocence.

The city’s youngest mayor also brought some victories to Jackson, particularly in his first year in office. In 2017, he ended a furlough of city employees and worked with then-Gov. Phil Bryant to avoid a state takeover of Jackson Public Schools. In 2019, the city successfully sued German engineering firm Siemens and its local contractors for $89 million over botched work installing the city’s water-sewer billing infrastructure.

“I think that that was a pivotal moment to say that this city is going to hold people responsible for the work that they do,” Lumumba said.

Lumumba had more time than any other mayor to usher in the 1% sales tax, which residents approved in 2014 to fund infrastructure improvements.

“We paved 144 streets,” he said. “There are residents that still are waiting on their roads to be repaved. And you don’t really feel it until it’s your street that gets repaved, but that is a significant undertaking.”

And under his administration, crime has fallen dramatically recently, with homicides cut by a third and shootings cut in half in the last year.

Lumumba was first elected in 2017 after defeating Tony Yarber, a business-friendly mayor who faced his own scandals as mayor. A criminal justice attorney, Lumumba said he never planned to seek office until the stunning death of his father, Chokwe Lumumba Sr., eight months into his first term as mayor in 2014.

“I can say without reservation, and unequivocally, we remember where we started. We are in a much better position than we started,” Lumumba said.

Lumumba said he has sat down with Horhn in recent months, answered questions “as extensively as I could,” and promised to remain reachable to the new mayor.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post 'Hurdles waiting in the shadows': Lumumba reflects on challenges and triumphs on final day as Jackson mayor appeared first on mississippitoday.org

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

The article reports on outgoing Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s reflections without overt editorializing but subtly frames his tenure within progressive contexts, emphasizing his self-described goal to make Jackson “the most radical city in America.” The piece highlights his accomplishments alongside challenges, including public crises and a federal indictment, maintaining a factual tone yet noting contentious moments like labor disputes and governance issues. While it avoids partisan rhetoric, the focus on social justice efforts, infrastructure investment, and crime reduction, as well as positive framing of Lumumba’s achievements, aligns with a center-left perspective that values progressive governance and accountability.

Mississippi Today

Feds unfreeze $137 million in Mississippi education money

Published

6 hours ago

June 30, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @devnabose – 2025-06-30 15:37:00

by Devna Bose, Mississippi Today
June 30, 2025

The federal government is restoring $137 million in education funds to Mississippi schools.

The U.S. Department of Education notified states last week that it would reinstate pandemic relief funds. The decision comes less than three months after the federal government revoked billions nationwide as part of Trump administration efforts to cut government spending.

State education agencies and school districts originally had until March 2026 to spend the money, but the federal government claimed that because the pandemic was over, they had no use for the money.

That March 2026 deadline has been reinstated following a series of injunctive orders.

A coalition of Democratic-led states sued the federal government in April over the decision to withhold the money. Then, a federal judge granted plaintiff states injunctive orders in the case, which meant those states could continue spending their COVID-relief dollars while other states remained restricted.

But the education department decided that wasn’t fair, wrote Secretary Linda McMahon in a letter dated June 26, so the agency was restoring the money to all states, not just the ones involved in the lawsuit.

“The original intent of the policy announced on March 28 was to treat all states consistently with regards to safeguarding and refocusing their remaining COVID-era grant funding on students,” she wrote. “The ongoing litigation has created basic fairness and uniformity problems.”

The Mississippi Department of Education notified school districts about the decision on Friday.

In the meantime, schools and states have been requesting exemptions for individual projects, though many from across the country have been denied.

Eleven Mississippi school districts had submitted requests to use the money to fund services such as tutoring and counseling, according to records requested by Mississippi Today, though those are now void because of the federal government’s decision.

Starting immediately, school districts can submit new requests to the state education department to draw down their federal allocation.

Mississippi Today previously reported that about 70 school districts were relying on the federal funds to pay for a range of initiatives, including construction projects, mental health services and literacy programs.

In 2023, almost half of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds, pandemic relief money allocated to schools across the country, went to students’ academic, social, and emotional needs. A third went to operational and staff costs, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Education.

Though Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said that legislative leaders might consider helping agencies that were impacted by federal funding cuts, House Speaker Jason White said Monday that he did not have an appetite for directing state funds to pandemic-era programs.

Small school districts were already feeling the impact of the federal government’s decision to rescind the money. In May, Greenwood Leflore Consolidated School Board voted to terminate a contract on a school construction project funded with federal dollars.

The litigation is ongoing, so the funding could again be rescinded.

Clarification: A previous version of this article misstated the status of school districts’ pandemic relief money.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post Feds unfreeze $137 million in Mississippi education money appeared first on mississippitoday.org

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

This article primarily reports on the federal government’s decision to restore $137 million in education funds to Mississippi schools after a temporary freeze. It presents factual information about the timeline, legal actions, and responses from various state officials without adopting a partisan tone. The piece mentions the involvement of Democratic-led states suing the federal government and notes Republican-aligned efforts to cut spending, but does so in a balanced way focused on reporting events and statements rather than promoting a political viewpoint. The language remains neutral and factual, avoiding loaded or biased framing, making it a straightforward news report with centrist bias.