Mississippi Today
Gov. Reeves doesn’t mention Medicaid expansion or health care crisis in State of the State address
With momentum growing in the Mississippi Legislature to expand Medicaid, Gov. Tate Reeves said nary a word Monday evening during his annual State of the State address about the issue he has opposed for more than a decade.
Republican House Speaker Jason White has filed legislation to expand Medicaid to provide health insurance to primarily poor working Mississippians. Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, also has indicated that his leadership team will take up the issue this session.
Instead of urging legislators not to expand Medicaid as he did during last year’s State and of the State speech, the Republican governor focused his speech on how he said Mississippi could be the new manufacturing hub for America.
Full transcript: Gov. Tate Reeves’ 2024 State of the State address
Reeves, who is known during his more than 20-year political career for his often aggressive and contentious demeanor, said he was “not going to focus on our differences … I am here tonight instead to challenge you as a Legislature to waste no time on the things that divide us, and instead spend your energy this year on things that unite us. Our state has many challenges. We also have many opportunities. In fact we have more opportunities than we have ever had before.”
Some were disappointed, though, that Reeves did not address the health care crisis facing the state. Rep. Timaka James-Jones, D-Belzoni, has been outspoken on the need for state officials to address a lack of hospitals and access to medical care in areas like her district in the Mississippi Delta.
James-Jones, a freshman lawmaker, said she hopes the governor will take serious steps to find bipartisan solutions to all of Mississippi’s issues, but she said it was “problematic” for the governor not to mention the state’s health care crisis in his speech.
“We definitely need to have a candid conversation about health care,” James-Jones said. “I don’t know why he’s not addressing that issue. Folks want to hear what the state is doing about our health care statistics. Don’t avoid the issue. Just work with the people.”
PODCAST: Inside the Medicaid expansion debate at the Capitol
Reeves, who touted two major economic development projects he announced earlier this year, said jobs are returning from overseas to America. He said that is good for Mississippi, which has “never stopped making real things.”
Speaking to a joint session of the Legislature in House chamber of the state Capitol, Reeves said, “We can take advantage of this moment and create unimagined wealth, prosperity, and purpose for our state. We can make Mississippi the new American capital of manufacturing, industry, and agribusiness. Mississippi can be the headwaters of America’s supply chain if we are bold.”
He said to achieve those goals the state must make a significant investment in airports, rails and ports, as well as in Mississippi’s highway system.
In terms of education, Reeves said, “We must be open to new and different models. We should fund students, not systems. We should trust our parents, not bureaucrats, and we should embrace education freedom.”
The governor, who was interrupted multiple times by applause, proposed 12 mathematics and engineering schools across the state modeled after the long-standing Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science located in Columbus. Eight of the new schools would be for pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, and three would be for high school students. He proposed one of those schools be located in downtown Jackson blocks from the state Capitol in the old Central High School Building that currently houses the Department of Education.
The governor also called for improving technology across state government through the formation of a task force and bolstering public safety.
Rep. Robert Johnson, D-Natchez, who gave the minority response, said to move Mississippi forward, as the governor said he wanted to do, health care must be addressed in a state that has many of the worse health care outcomes and one of the highest percentages of uninsured residents in the nation.
READ MORE: What’s in the House Republican Mississippi Medicaid expansion bill?
While Johnson said House Democrats support what is known as traditional Medicaid expansion, he said the Legislature should go even further this session.
He said the Democrats’ plan “would insure Mississippians up to 200% of the federal poverty level – those are individuals making roughly $30,000 a year. Traditional Medicaid expansion would only insure individuals who are at or below 138% of the federal poverty level. This hybrid plan – a 50/50 combination of traditional Medicaid expansion with private options and premium assistance – will provide insurance coverage to the people that need it most, make insurance coverage more affordable for working families, and would help address the myriad issues facing the healthcare system in our state.”
Johnson also called for the governor to work with the same zeal to bring economic development projects to impoverished, Black-majority areas of the state as he has in more affluent, White-majority areas.
“Mississippi has the lowest per capita income in the country. We have the highest rate of poverty in the country – nearly 20%. And both of those statistics are doubled or disproportionately worse in the Mississippi Delta and southwest Mississippi,” Johnson said. “Those numbers simply don’t improve without intentional, equitable economic development.”
Johnson concluded: “We’re a better place when we work together and overcome our differences for the good of the people we represent. We need leaders who bring people together, who acknowledge the problems we face and try to understand the causes of those problems alongside the people most affected.”
Reeves also provided a conciliatory tone during his speech.
‘There will be time to go back to politics and disagreement later,” Reeves said. “But this year, at this time, with these opportunities, let’s come together.”
Whether that spirit of cooperation will extend to Medicaid expansion to provide health insurance for an estimated 200,000 poor working Mississippians remains to be seen.
READ MORE: Gov. Tate Reeves’ lonely last stand against Medicaid expansion
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1875
Nov. 2, 1875
The first Mississippi Plan, which included violence against Black Americans to keep them from voting, resulted in huge victories for white Democrats across the state.
A year earlier, the Republican Party had carried a majority of the votes, and many Black Mississippians had been elected to office. In the wake of those victories, white leagues arose to challenge Republican rule and began to use widespread violence and fraud to recapture control of the state.
Over several days in September 1875, about 50 Black Mississippians were killed along with white supporters, including a school teacher who worked with the Black community in Clinton.
The governor asked President Ulysses Grant to intervene, but he decided against intervening, and the violence and fraud continued. Other Southern states soon copied the Mississippi plan.
John R. Lynch, the last Black congressman for Mississippi until the 1986 election of Mike Espy, wrote: “It was a well-known fact that in 1875 nearly every Democratic club in the State was converted into an armed military company.”
A federal grand jury concluded: “Fraud, intimidation, and violence perpetrated at the last election is without a parallel in the annals of history.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Mississippi Today’s NewsMatch Campaign is Here: Support Journalism that Strengthens Mississippi
High-quality journalism like ours depends on reader support; without it, we simply couldn’t exist. That’s why we’re proud to join the NewsMatch movement, a national initiative aimed at raising $50 million for nonprofit newsrooms that serve communities like ours here in Mississippi, where access to reliable information has often been limited.
In a time when trusted journalists and media sources are disappearing, we believe the stakes couldn’t be higher. Without on-the-ground, trustworthy reporting, civic engagement suffers, accountability falters and corruption often goes unaddressed. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
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Every dollar raised strengthens our ability to serve you with fact-based journalism on issues that impact your everyday life—whether it’s covering local election issues or reporting on decisions affecting schools, safety and economic growth in Mississippi. Your support makes it possible for us to stay rooted in the community, offering nuanced perspectives that help Mississippians understand and engage with what’s happening around them.
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We’ll examine what’s at stake if local newsrooms lose press freedoms and will discuss how you, as members of the public, can help protect it. This event is open to Mississippi Today and Verite News members as a special thank-you for supporting local journalism and standing with us in this mission. Donate today to RSVP!
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This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Hinds County loses fight over control of jail
The Hinds County sheriff and Board of Supervisors have lost an appeal to prevent control of its jail by a court-appointed receiver and an injunction that orders the county to address unconstitutional conditions in the facility.
Two members from a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with decisions by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves to appoint a receiver to oversee day-to-day jail operations and keep parts of a previous consent decree in place to fix constitutional violations, including a failure to protect detainees from harm.
However, the appeals court called the new injunction “overly broad” in one area and is asking Reeves to reevaluate the scope of the receivership.
The injunction retained provisions relating to sexual assault, but the appeals court found the provisions were tied to general risk of violence at the jail, rather than specific concerns about the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The court reversed those points of the injunction and remanded them to the district court so the provisions can be removed.
The court also found that the receiver should not have authority over budgeting and staff salaries for the Raymond Detention Center, which could be seen as “federal intrusion into RDC’s budget” – especially if the receivership has no end date.
Hinds County Board of Supervisors President Robert Graham was not immediately available for comment Friday. Sheriff Tyree Jones declined to comment because he has not yet read the entire court opinion.
In 2016, the Department of Justice sued Hinds County alleging a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conditions in four of its detention facilities. The county and DOJ entered a consent decree with stipulated changes to make for the jail system, which holds people facing trial.
“But the decree did not resolve the dispute; to the contrary, a yearslong battle ensued in the district court as to whether and to what extent the County was complying with the consent decree,” the appeals court wrote.
This prompted Reeves to hold the county in contempt of court twice in 2022.
The county argued it was doing its best to comply with the consent decree and spending millions to fix the jail. One of the solutions they offered was building a new jail, which is now under construction in Jackson.
The county had a chance to further prove itself during three weeks of hearings held in February 2022. Focuses included the death of seven detainees in 2021 from assaults and suicide and issues with staffing, contraband, old infrastructure and use of force.
Seeing partial compliance by the county, in April 2022 Reeves dismissed the consent decree and issued a new, shorter injunction focused on the jail and removed some provisions from the decree.
But Reeves didn’t see improvement from there. In July 2022, he ordered receivership and wrote that it was needed because of an ongoing risk of unconstitutional harm to jail detainees and staff.
The county pushed back against federal oversight and filed an appeal, arguing that there isn’t sufficient evidence to show that there are current and ongoing constitutional violations at the jail and that the county has acted with deliberate indifference.
Days before the appointed receiver was set to take control of the jail at the beginning of 2023, the 5th Circuit Court ordered a stay to halt that receiver’s work. The new injunction ordered by Reeves was also stayed, and a three-person jail monitoring team that had been in place for years also was ordered to stop work.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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