Reeves ridiculous on Medicaid
Just when it looked as if Mississippi might be warming up — finally — to the unrefutable logic of expanding Medicaid to cover the working poor, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves has thrown ice water again on the idea.
Reeves said this week that he is opposed to covering more of the uninsured — even if that means forgoing an estimated billion dollars a year in federal dollars that would create thousands of jobs and shore up the state’s struggling hospitals.
It had been reported recently that Gov. Phil Bryant, who had been as mule-headed as Reeves when it came to accepting the sweet deal that Obamacare offers the states, was exploring ways to expand the federal-state health insurance program, possibly by seeking waivers that would reduce even further what would already be a very modest state match.
But Reeves, who has a habit of keeping senators from voting on anything that he doesn’t support or he perceives as contrary to his political interests, indicated he would not go along.
“I will remain opposed to any call for Obamacare expansion, no matter what other name or what other form you want to call it,” Reeves said at a press function.
When pressed for an explanation, The Associated Press reported, Reeves said three times, “I’m opposed to Obamacare expansion in Mississippi,” then added, “I don’t know how many ways I can explain this to y’all.”
The reason he is being hounded by the question — and why he will be pounded about it on the campaign trail for governor by his Democratic opponent, Jim Hood — is the opposition is incomprehensible.
Many rural hospitals in this state are suffering because they don’t have enough patients and too many they do have are uninsured and can’t pay for their treatment.
Greenwood Leflore Hospital is a perfect example of the financial plight that the Tate Reeves style of Obamacare paranoia has created.
That hospital has lost almost $37 million over the past three years. Although its finances appear to be improving, it’s still losing money. For the first three months of the budget year that began Oct. 1, it was more than a million dollars in the red.
Subho Basu, the hospital’s interim CEO, estimates that the hospital would be getting $7 million to $10 million more in revenue a year if Mississippi had expanded Medicaid. Assuming his estimates are close to right, the hospital’s combined losses from 2016 to 2018 would have been more than halved, and it would be back to profitability this year under Medicaid expansion.
The majority of states have done the math and figured out it’s insane to look this gift horse in the mouth. The number of initial holdouts has been steadily dropping. Only 14 remain. Yet, Mississippi, the poorest state of them all, the one with the sickest population, the one with the most stagnant economy, is one of them — and it’s all because of Tate Reeves and others like him who put blind allegiance to ideology over common sense.
If he and other Republicans in power don’t see the light soon, more community hospitals in this state are going to close, and others will be a shell of what they were.
Hopefully it won’t have to get to that point before people wake up and wonder whose interest do these obstructionists represent. Not this community, that’s for certain.
