After years of partisan fear, loathing and failed attempts in the Legislature, healthcare and racial justice advocates want Mississippi voters to force the issue and expand Medicaid at the ballot box. Some GOP-led states that previously declined to expand Medicaid are reconsidering that decision now that the $1.9 trillion pandemic-relief package has made billions of dollars available to enlarge the program.
- Plans to boost federal funds: The legislation passed by Congress last month boosts federal funding for two years to states that expand Medicaid, more than covering a state’s cost for increasing eligibility for the program, which is currently used by almost 79 million low-income and disabled people. The availability of more federal funds is putting pressure on Republican leaders in some of the 12 states that haven’t expanded the program.
- Refused to expand Medicaid: Medicaid expansion through the federal Affordable Care Act has brought heated and most often partisan debate in Mississippi, the poorest state in the union. Mississippi, despite its dependence otherwise on federal money, is one of just 12 states that has refused to expand Medicaid, leaving hundreds of thousands of “working poor,” uninsured Mississippians without health coverage and rejecting at least $1 billion a year in federal funds to provide it.
- Fairness Project Benefits: The Fairness Project, working with Medicaid expansion supporters in Mississippi, says more than 200,000 people would gain healthcare coverage and the state would save more than $800 million in just the first two years thanks to funding in the American Rescue Plan Act. The Fairness Project is backing a separate effort in South Dakota with the support of the South Dakota Association of Healthcare Organizations, the South Dakota Medical Association, the South Dakota Farm Bureau, and others.
- Mississippi Voters Are Ready: “Everytime voters have been asked whether they want to expand Medicaid by ballot initiative, they’ve said yes — even in the deepest of red states,” said Jonathan Schleifer, executive director of The Fairness Project. “Voters in Mississippi are ready to do the same, expanding health care for hundreds of thousands of Americans who have gone without during this pandemic.”
- Expansion to Benefit Mississippi: Although many Republicans are against the expansion, healthcare, racial justice, and other advocates of expansion say it would help impoverished Mississippi tackle one of the global and persistent problems that keep it on the bottom: the unhealthiness of its people. The ACA expansion would provide health coverage for people making up to 138% of the federal poverty level, or about $17,600 a year for an individual.