Mississippi Today
Maybe health care policy just isn’t Gov. Tate Reeves’ thing
With his fellow Republican leaders set against him and pushing Medicaid expansion through the Legislature, Gov. Tate Reeves had a statewide platform last week with his State of the State address to warn Mississippians of the perils of this policy.
But he said nothing. Zilch.
He didn't even mention the state's dire, long-running health care problems that rival third-world areas.
Instead, he's tweeted about it.
Actually, he mainly just retweeted Donald Trump's erudite, well-thought argument against Medicaid expansion: “Obamacare Sucks!!!”
But later last week, as GOP-led expansion legislation continued moving through the Legislature, Reeves elaborated on his well-reasoned, detailed argument against the policy:
“Count me amongst those ‘extreme MAGA Republicans' who think Government should not run health care,” Reeves tweeted.
So, for the one issue before Reeves that is, literally, life-or-death for many of his fellow Mississippians, he offers no policy. Only politics. Obamacare sucks.
Reeves, in his eight years as lieutenant governor and nearly a full first term as governor, never really had any health care initiatives — sort of like Trump when he was president. It just wasn't on his radar, even as Mississippians and hospitals struggled.
Reeves has never been all that big on proposing any major policies — just killing others' proposals or glomming onto them if they look like a winning ticket politically. By his own admission, he's never shy about saying, “No.”
Reeves has made clear he believes taking more federal Medicaid tax dollars to provide health care for poor working Mississippians sucks. It's dirty, corrosive “welfare” money that Mississippi just doesn't need. Mississippians, he has opined, just need to get better jobs where they have insurance. Quit being poor. Quit being sick.
Yet, when his reelection campaign was bailing water last year from his lack of any plan to address the health care crisis threatening to shutter many hospitals, Reeves hastily came up with one: He expanded Medicaid payments to hospitals.
That's right, he opted to take more of that dirty Medicaid “welfare” federal tax money as a stopgap in his only major health care policy to date.
Not only that, the avowed anti-tax Reeves levied a tax on hospitals to cover the state match to draw down the welfare — er — Medicaid money.
If you're playing along at home, it's hard to scan, but this appears to be his overall tack: Federal dollars are bad, if they go to help poor, struggling Mississippians (of which there are many, and, just doing some napkin math, many vote Republican). But federal dollars are good if they go to businesses or institutions or, really, anything besides said poor folk.
READ MORE: ‘Moral imperative': House overwhelmingly passes Mississippi Medicaid expansion
Reeves recently boasted at a press conference of the state receiving more than $1 billion in federal money to expand internet service, that he wanted Mississippi to receive not only its fair share of the federal largesse, but “more than our fair share.”
But Mississippi — perennially at or near the top of the list of most federally dependent states — accepting federal money to address our having at or near the highest rates of infant mortality, maternal mortality, early mortality in general, amputations from diabetes, lack of doctors … well, that's just wrong.
Republicans House Speaker Jason White and Medicaid Chairwoman Missy McGee last week after shepherding an expansion bill through the House struck a chord.
“‘No' is not a policy that has helped or will help low-income, working Mississippians,” McGee said.
White last week noted that Medicaid expansion is not a perfect solution, but it's the only realistic one presently available to address the state's health care crisis.
“It's like when momma only put out turnip greens and cornbread for supper,” White said. “That was it. There wasn't anything else coming out. You could eat it or not.
“It's what's for supper.”
If you're the governor of a state, and your state has the highest mortality rates, the lowest life expectancy — again, third-world health statistics — well, it's probably time to start engaging with your fellow state leaders on solutions, start talking with the citizenry about it.
It's probably time to propose some policies, especially if you don't like the ones they're coming up with.
“Obamacare sucks!!!” is not a real policy.
“No” is not a real policy.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
On this day in 1917
May 5, 1917
Eugene Jacques Bullard became the first Black American combat pilot.
After the near lynching of his father and hearing that Great Britain lacked such racism, the 12-year-old Georgia native stowed away on a ship headed for Scotland. From there, he moved to Liverpool, England, where he handled odd jobs before becoming a boxer, traveling across Europe before he settled in Paris.
“It seems to me that the French democracy influenced the minds of both White and Black Americans there and helped us all to act like brothers as near as possible,” he said. “It convinced me, too, that God really did create all men equal, and it was easy to live that way.”
When World War I began, he was too young to fight for his adopted country, so he and other American expatriates joined the French Foreign Legion. Through a series of battles, he was wounded, and doctors believed he would never walk again.
No longer able to serve in the infantry, an American friend bet him $2,000 that he could not get into aviation. Taking on the challenge, he earned his “wings” and began fighting for the French Aéronautique Militaire.
He addressed racism with words on his plane, “All Blood Runs Red,” and he nicknamed himself, “The Black Swallow of Death.”
On his flights, he reportedly took along a Rhesus monkey named “Jimmy.” He tried to join the U.S. Air Service, only to be turned away because he was Black. He became one of France's most decorated war heroes, earning the French Legion of Honor.
After the war he bought a Paris nightclub, where Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong performed and eventually helped French officials ferret out Nazi sympathizers. After World War II ended, he moved to Harlem, but his widespread fame never followed him back to the U.S.
In 1960, when French President Charles de Gaulle visited, he told government officials that he wanted to see his old friend, Bullard. No one in the government knew where Bullard was, and the FBI finally found him in an unexpected place — working as an elevator operator at the Rockefeller Center in New York City.
After de Gaulle's visit, he appeared on “The Today Show,” which was shot in the same building where he worked.
Upon his death from cancer in 1961, he was buried with honors in the French War Veterans' section of the Flushing Cemetery in Queens, New York.
A sculpture of Bullard can be viewed in the Smithsonian National Space and Air Museum in Washington, D.C., a statue of him can be found outside the Museum of Aviation, and an exhibit on him can be seen inside the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, which posthumously gave him the rank of a second lieutenant. He is loosely portrayed in the 2006 film, “Flyboys.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
A seat at table for Democrats might have gotten Medicaid expansion across the finish line
The Mississippi Capitol is 171,000 square feet, granted a massive structure, but when it comes to communication between the two legislative chambers that occupy the building, it might as well be as big as the cosmos.
Such was the case in recent days during the intense and often combustible process that eventually led to the death of Medicaid expansion and with that the loss of the opportunity to provide health care for 200,000 working poor Mississippians with the federal government paying the bulk of the cost.
Democrats in the state House came under intense pressure and criticism for blocking a Medicaid expansion compromise reached by Republican House and Senate negotiators.
First of all, it would be disingenuous to argue that Democrats, who compose less than one-third of the membership of either chamber, blocked any proposal. Truth be known, Republicans should be able to pass anything they want without a solitary Democratic vote.
But on this particular issue, the Republican legislative leadership who finally decided that Medicaid expansion would be good for the state needed the votes of the minority party, which incidentally had been working for 10 years to pass Medicaid expansion. The reason their votes were needed is that many Republicans, despite the wishes of their leaders, still oppose Medicaid expansion.
The breakdown in the process could be attributed to the decision of the two presiding officers, House Speaker Jason White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann in the Senate, not to appoint a single Democrat to the all-important conference committee.
Conference committees are formed of three senators and three House members who work out the differences between the two chambers on a bill. Considering that Democratic votes were needed in both chambers to pass Medicaid expansion, and considering Democrats had been working on the issue for a decade while Republicans blocked it, it would have made sense that they had a seat at the table in the final negotiations process.
One Democrat from each chamber on the conference committee could not have altered the outcome of the negotiations. But the two Democrats could have provided input on what their fellow legislative Democrats would accept and vote for.
In the eyes of the Democrats, the compromise reached without their voice being heard was unworkable and would not have resulted in Medicaid expansion.
The Republican compromise said Medicaid would not be expanded until the federal government provided a waiver mandating those on Medicaid expansion were working. Similar work requirement requests by other states have been denied. Under the compromise, if the work requirement was rejected by federal officials, Medicaid expansion would not occur in Mississippi.
After voicing strong objections to the work requirement, House Minority Leader Rep. Robert Johnson, recognizing the Senate would not budge from the work requirement, offered a compromise. The Johnson compromise to the compromise was to remove a provision mandating the state apply annually with federal officials for the work requirement.
Instead, under Johnson's proposal, state Medicaid officials would be mandated to apply just once for the work requirement. If it was rejected, Medicaid expansion would not occur, but hopefully that would compel the Legislature to take up the issue of the work requirement and perhaps remove it.
“We just want the Legislature to come back and have a conversation next year if the federal government doesn't approve the work requirement. It's as simple as that,” Johnson said.
Senate leaders agreed that Johnson's proposal was a simple ask and something they might consider.
But Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, said he never heard Johnson's proposal until late in the process — too late in the process, as it turned out.
Speaker Jason White, R-West, also said he never heard the proposal, though Johnson said he repeatedly discussed it with House leaders. He certainly was relaying the information to the media during the final hectic days before Medicaid expansion died.
And perhaps if Johnson or one of his Democratic colleagues had been on the conference committee, that information would have been heard by the right legislative people and perhaps Medicaid expansion would not have died.
After all, a conference room or an office where negotiators are meeting to hammer out a compromise is much smaller than the massive state Capitol, where communications often get lost in the cosmos.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1884
May 4, 1884
Crusading journalist Ida B. Wells, an African-American native of Holly Springs, Mississippi, was riding a train from Memphis to Woodstock, Tennessee, where she worked as a teacher, when a white railroad conductor ordered her to move to another car. She refused.
When the conductor grabbed her by the arm, “I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand,” she wrote.
The conductor got help from others, who dragged her off the train.
In response, she sued the railroad, saying the company forced Black Americans to ride in “separate but unequal” coaches. A local judge agreed, awarding her $500 in damages.
But the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed that ruling three years later. The decision upended her belief in the court system.
“I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed it, give us justice,” she said. “I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them.”
Wells knew about caring for others. At age 16, she raised her younger siblings after her parents and a brother died in a yellow fever epidemic. She became a teacher to support her family.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.biloxinewsevents.com/?p=355325
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