Earlier this month, the Lowndes County Board of supervisors authorized county engineer Bob Calvert to submit three road/bridge projects to the state for funding under the state’s new emergency roads/bridges fund.
In order to make the projects appealing, Calvert suggested the county agree to a 10 percent match on any funds designated for the project.
“Anytime you can get a deal where you pay only 10 percent of the cost, it’s a pretty good deal,” said board president Harry Sanders.
Sanders is a Republican. So is two-term Governor Phil Bryant.
The difference between the two is that Sanders knows a good deal when he sees one.
Ever since moving into the Governor’s mansion, Bryant, a Tea-Party Republican, has been unrelenting in his refusal to accept one key component found in the Affordable Care Act, which is often referred to as “Obamacare” — expanding Medicaid to working people who cannot afford health insurance and whose employers do not provide healthcare coverage.
Since the AFA was passed in 2010, 36 states have realized the value of Medicaid expansion — both in terms of economic impact and improving the lives of their residents — and signed on for the expansion. That list includes some reliably Republican states — Idaho, Utah, Nebraska, Indiana and Kentucky, just to name a few.
Until now, Bryant has remained steadfastly opposed to offering that opportunity in a state that has the highest percentage of residents with no healthcare coverage.
Bryant has dismissed the human toll of failure to expand Medicaid. He won’t even mention it.
Instead, he has focused his argument against expansion entirely on the cost. Medicaid expansion would bring $1 billion in federal healthcare funding to the state, which means Mississippi would be on the hook for a $100 million match.
“We can’t afford it,” Bryant clucks with a mock expression of regret on his face.
Hey, $100 million is a lot of money, right? Who has that kind of cash to throw around?
Who?
Why, Mississippi, that’s who.
During Bryant’s tenure as Governor, the state has provided almost $1 billion in tax breaks and incentives to build tire plants in Hinds ($600 million) and Clay ($330 million) counties.
Bryant, who once said his only regret about those deals is that he couldn’t have offered even more taxpayer money to the companies, defended those moves by calling them investments in the state’s economy. Those tire plants create jobs, after all.
Funny, isn’t it, that the same calculations do not apply to Medicaid expansion, which would creates hundreds, perhaps, thousands of good-paying jobs in the medical industry while addressing the serious health needs of hundreds of thousands of uninsured working people in our state.
Here’s another way of calculating the cost that the Governor refuses to acknowledge. Since 2013, five rural hospitals — including Gilmore Hospital in Amory — have filed for bankruptcy. Those hospitals attribute their failure to the cost of providing healthcare to the uninsured. While hospitals in more urban areas are growing, health care in the small towns that dominate our state is in a serious state of decline.
There is even a greater cost of the failure to expand Medicaid that cannot be accurately counted — the loss of human lives.
For those without healthcare coverage, the only treatment available to them are emergency rooms, which also are the most expensive form of healthcare and whose costs are passed on to those who do have coverage.
But ER care does not include preventative care as regular health insurance does. How many people have wound up in the hospital ER to be told that their illness has advanced to the terminal stage? How many of those might have been saved by early detection and treatment that only health insurance provides? The estimates range from hundreds to tens of thousands. There is simply no way to know for certain.
Expanding Medicaid has been proven to be an economic win and a life-saving measure in the states that have expanded Medicaid. There is no evidence to support the notion that people who live in states where the program has been expanded have suddenly turned into raging Socialists, either. They’re just ordinary people whose lives have been improved and saved by being able to see a doctor when they are sick. There’s not an ounce of socialist politics in that.
Partisan politics dominates Bryant’s every move, but heading into an election year, it appears the failure of Medicaid expansion is becoming a political vulnerability for Bryant’s fellow Republicans. Regular folks, regardless of their political views, are beginning to see the value of expansion.
There are rumors that Bryant may be quietly seeking a way to expand Medicaid.
If that happens, he’ll likely borrow a page from the Trump playbook — simply calling it something other than Medicaid expansion (which is what Trump did with NAFTA and what Mike Pence did when he accepted Medicaid expansion as governor of Indiana).
However Medicaid expansion comes, it will have to be perceived as a Bryant victory rather than a submission because he’s just that small, that petty of a man.
Fine. We’ll take Medicaid expansion anyway we can get it.
Like Harry Sanders, we know a good deal when we see one.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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