This is the republican party stance on the elderly and the people just getting by: Roger Wicker may have no use for Medicaid, but his constituents certainly do Bill Minor JACKSON, MS United States senators are supposed to come home in August to impart wisdom about congressional accomplishments to make life better for their constituents and then seek information from the home folks about how federal programs already in place are helping. Our Roger Wicker, in his obligatory interview on Mississippi Public Broadcasting last week, did neither. He of course couldn’t brag about Congress’ accomplishments because there weren’t any, unless gridlock counts as an accomplishment. And rather than asking how federal programs are working for Mississippians, Republican Wicker proceeds to pontificate that Medicaid, a real biggie in this economically struggling state, is a failure. Medicaid, he said, “has been a very unsuccessful program in Mississippi.” Say what? Try telling that to the 600,000 needy Mississippians who depend on Medicaid as their sole health care insurance. What Wicker and his fellow naysayers don’t want to know is the vital role Medicaid plays in saving the lives of thousands of infants in Mississippi through prenatal or early-birth care. Dr. Alton Cobb, one of Mississippi’s leading public health authorities — and the state’s first Medicaid director when the program was installed 45 years ago — was aghast when he heard Wicker’s statement on MPB’s Mississippi Edition. “What he (Wicker) said about Medicaid just isn’t true,” Cobb told me. The retired doctor added: “He doesn’t have a grasp on what is going on in rural Mississippi.” Cobb can speak with rare credibility as to the vital role Medicaid plays in rural health care in Mississippi. His son, Tommy, is a family physician at Starkville whose clinic serves a broad area in rural northeast Mississippi and a son-in-law, Tim Alford, also a family physician, heads a very busy east-central regional clinic based at Kosciusko. A big segment of their patient load, the elder Cobb said, comes from Medicaid recipients. In his comments to MPB, Wicker blamed Medicaid as the reason a number of counties don’t have a doctor. He contended that the amount of paperwork and low rate of physician compensation under the Medicaid program has discouraged many doctors from practicing in counties that have a substantial number of persons enrolled in the program. “I would wager that the senator can’t name 10 doctors in Mississippi who now refuse to take Medicaid patients,” Cobb declared. The only way many small hospitals in rural areas are able to keep their doors open is from Medicaid or Medicare payments, says Roy Mitchell, director of the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program. “A lot of health providers in Mississippi desperately need economic help,” Mitchell said. That’s why hospitals around the state, he said, strongly support expansion of Medicaid under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. Mitchell cited Hancock County Medical Center as a prime example of a small hospital now in danger of having to close unless it gets an injection of funds from the county or additional revenue from Medicaid expansion. Hancock Medical, the lone hospital in the coastal county, is seeking a $6.1 million bond issue from the county board of supervisors. After monstrous Hurricane Katrina plowed into Hancock County in August 2005, the hospital served as a life-saving refuge to render medical care to injured citizens whose homes were devastated by the storm. Wicker, slavishly echoing the GOP party line handed him before coming down, joined the anti-Medicaid expansion chorus of state officials Phil Bryant, Tate Reeves and Philip Gunn, saying he thinks state leaders “are correct trying to resist” expansion. When asked by MPB reporter Jeffrey Hess if he was concerned that some 250,000 working poor in Mississippi wouldn’t be able to get subsidized health care coverage if Medicaid expansion is blocked, Wicker made a lame statement that some “market oriented” idea could be worked out, but he offered no specific plan. Apparently Republican leadership in Congress, seeing no chance of repealing Obamacare, told its troops to attack Medicaid expansion — optional with each state — as the one vulnerable route to sabotage the entire program. Write to Bill Minor, who has covered Mississippi politics since 1947, at P.O. Box 1243, Jackson, MS 39215.
Posted on: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 21:11:19 +0000
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