Lawmakers more likely to confront Medicaid expansion after 2015 elections
STARKVILLE – Public health care advocates hoping to see Medicaid expansion in Mississippi under the Affordable Care Act will likely again be disappointed during the 2014 session of the Mississippi Legislature.
With Mississippi’s eight statewide officials and all 174 state legislators in the final legislative session before the 2015 election cycle begins in earnest, the chances of Medicaid expansion drawing more than a few press conferences or protest rallies are slim and none. Republicans and less than dyed-in-the-wool Democrats alike will avoid the issue like the plague.
Why? As was test-driven by the 2014 Mississippi U.S. Senate campaign, Mississippi voters still in great measure see Medicaid expansion not as a facet of the ACA but as the pejorative “Obamacare” – and emblematic of runaway government spending.
Closer to home, Gov. Phil Bryant hasn’t wavered in his opposition to Medicaid expansion by any name. “For us to enter into an expansion program would be a fool’s errand,” he told the Associated Press earlier this year. “I mean, here we would be saying to 300,000 Mississippians, ‘We’re going to provide Medicaid coverage to you,’ and then the federal government through Congress or through the Senate, would do away with or alter the Affordable Care Act, and then we have no way to pay that. We have no way to continue the coverage.”
Gulflive
10/27/14
Magnolia Tribune
