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‘It is a moral obligation’: Faith leaders, advocates, doctors cite Christianity as reason to expand Medicaid

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It felt more like church than a health summit at moments inside Duling Hall on Thursday.

The Better Health Summit, hosted by the poverty-focused nonprofit Together for Hope and the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, brought together faith leaders, medical experts and health care advocates in Fondren for one common cause: improving health care in Mississippi by expanding Medicaid.

Summit attendees, no matter their backgrounds, echoed versions of the same question: Why haven’t political leaders, in a majority-Christian state, seen Medicaid expansion as an issue of morality?

Though panels at the summit ranged from accessing community-based health care to retaining physicians in rural Mississippi, speakers framed the issues around Medicaid expansion, and how far the policy measure would go to improve the livelihoods of working-class Mississippians.

Dr. Daniel Jones, former president of the American Heart Association, former chancellor of the University of Mississippi, and dean and professor emeritus at the University of Mississippi School of Medicine, speaks during the Better Health Summit event at Duling Hall in Jackson, Miss., Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023. Credit: Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today

Dr. Dan Jones, the former president of the American Heart Association and former chancellor of the University of Mississippi and dean and professor emeritus at the University of Mississippi School of Medicine, spoke freely at the summit, finally without his ties to state institutions, he said.

He told stories from his stints in Iran, North Korea and South Korea as a medical missionary, and how it compared to the care he was able to provide under Mississippi’s health care system.

While abroad, when Jones diagnosed people with hypertension and diabetes, he knew they were going to be able to access long-term care and medications, he said.

In Mississippi, Jones had to tell a patient he’d need to get his leg amputated. The man, a logger, knew he’d had diabetes for three years but was unable to access health care because he couldn’t afford health insurance.

After the amputation, the logger, as a disabled person, finally became eligible for health insurance through Medicaid.

“In our country, you had to lose a leg before he had access to health care,” he said. “When I went home that night after seeing that patient, I was so frustrated … I said, ‘What an insane world we live in. Today, I told a man he was going to lose his leg for a condition that was absolutely 100% preventable. And it was our country, our state, who let him down and allowed that to happen to him.’”

He drew a contrast between those countries — where health care is generally considered a right, not a privilege — and Mississippi, a state where most of its residents are Christians, yet it took an amputation to get someone insured.

“It’s easy to think living where… people don’t have reasonable access to health care is okay, because it’s just the way it is,” he said. “It’s not.”

Jones echoed his faith and how he sees Medicaid expansion as a spiritual issue.

“I hope when I stand in the booth a few days from now that my first priority will not be what is going to be the economic impact on my family when I cast this vote,” he said. “I hope one of my thoughts is … are we going to do something that Jesus would approve of doing — to provide health care access to the most vulnerable in our community.

“It’s time for action.”

Medicaid expansion has remained a top issue in the upcoming election, perhaps most prevalently featured in the gubernatorial race.

Republican incumbent Gov. Tate Reeves has remained opposed to the policy change, reiterating his opposition as recently as last month, while Democratic challenger Brandon Presley has vowed repeatedly to expand Medicaid on his first day in office, if elected.

People in the faith community are increasingly calling for Medicaid expansion, including leaders at Reeves’ own church, which is hosting a series of lectures this weekend about how providing access to health care is a Christian value.

Mississippi is one of only 10 states that has not expanded Medicaid.

Research shows that over its first few years of implementation, expansion would bring in billions of dollars to Mississippi. That money is needed — the pandemic weakened an already-frail health care infrastructure, and now nearly half of the state’s rural hospitals are at risk of closure, partially due to money lost caring for uninsured patients.

Event-goers attend the Better Health Summit event at Duling Hall in Jackson, Miss., on Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023. Credit: Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today

Kimberly Hughes, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network’s government relations director, stressed how critical insurance coverage is in the fight against cancer. Mississippi has one of the highest cancer mortality rates in the nation.

“Cancer is curable if it’s caught early, and it’s only caught early if it’s screened for, and screening requires appropriate health insurance,” she said.

Hughes described the types of Mississippians who expansion would cover — veterans, working parents and low-wage workers.

“Stop and think about people that you know, people that you love, people that are your neighbors that have no health insurance that could greatly benefit from it,” she said.

Rev. Jason Coker, a Baptist pastor and the president of Together for Hope, described his wife’s experience as a cancer survivor and wondered how other people could undergo the same thing without knowing they have access to treatment.

Though emergency rooms by law cannot turn down patients, other medical facilities can, making preventative treatment near-impossible to come by without health insurance.

“If we as the state of Mississippi are big Christians, super Baptist, if we can’t understand that as a moral issue, our religion is dead and worthless,” he said.

He described the connection between poverty and poor health outcomes, emphasizing the need for expansion.

According to Coker, 53 of the state’s 82 counties are in “persistent poverty,” and expansion would impact 200,000 to 300,000 Mississippians.

“People getting access to health care … We think that it is a moral obligation on our states to do that,” Coker said.

As Reeves and other state leaders who oppose expansion have derisively referred to Medicaid expansion as adding more people to “welfare rolls,” Coker warned Mississippians to take heed and reflect on themselves.

“So much of our politics in this day is bound up in that idea of who deserves state aid. Who deserves our help? You can only ask that question if you are standing in the seat of power,” Coker said. “We have elected officials in this state … who had the power to do something, and decided not to do it because they didn’t think someone else deserved it, or was worthy of it.

“And make no bones about it: That’s as deeply rooted in white superiority as anything that we know and our lived experience in the state of Mississippi. We call it racism. But it’s more than racism. It is white superiority.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

Jearld Baylis, dead at 62, was a nightmare for USM opponents

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mississippitoday.org – Rick Cleveland – 2025-01-09 14:19:00

Jearld Baylis was a tackling machine at Southern Miss. He died recently at age 62. (Southern Miss Athletics)

They called him The Space Ghost. Jearld Baylis — Jearld, not Jerald or Gerald — was the best defensive football player I ever saw at Southern Miss, and I’ve seen them all since the early 1960s.

Baylis, who died recently at the age of 62, played nose tackle with the emphasis on “tackle.” He made about a jillion tackles, many behind the scrimmage line, in his four years (1980-83) as a starter at USM after three years as a starter and star at Jackson Callaway.

When Southern Miss ended Bear Bryant’s 59-game home winning streak at Alabama in 1982, Baylis led the defensive charge with 18 tackles. The remarkable Reggie Collier, the quarterback, got most of the headlines during those golden years of USM football, but Baylis was every bit as important to the Golden Eagles’ success.

Rick Cleveland

The truth is, despite the lavish praise of opposing coaches such as Bryant at Alabama, Bobby Bowden at Florida State, Pat Dye at Auburn and Emory Bellard at Mississippi State, Baylis never got the credit he deserved.

There are so many stories. Here’s one from the late, great Kent Hull, the Mississippi State center who became one of the best NFL players at his position and helped the Buffalo Bills to four Super Bowls:

It was at one of those Super Bowls — the 1992 game in Minneapolis — when Hull and I talked about his three head-to-head battles with Baylis when they were both in college. Hull, you should know, was always brutally honest, which endeared him to sports writers and sportscasters everywhere.

Hull said Baylis was the best he ever went against. “Block him?” Hull said rhetorically at one point. “Hell, most times I couldn’t touch him. He was just so quick. You had to double-team him, and sometimes that didn’t work either.”

John Bond was the quarterback of those fantastic Mississippi State teams who won so many games but could never beat Southern Miss. He remembers Jearld Baylis the way most of us remember our worst nightmares.

“He was a stud,” Bond said upon learning of Baylis’s death. “He was their best dude on that side of the ball, a relentless badass.”

In many ways Baylis was a football unicorn. Most nose tackles are monsters, whose job it is to occupy the center and guards and keep them from blocking the linebackers. Not Baylis. He was undersized, 6-feet tall and 230 pounds tops, and he didn’t just clear the way for linebackers. He did it himself.

“Jearld was just so fast, so quick, so strong,” said Steve Carmody, USM’s center back then and a Jackson lawyer now. Carmody, son of then-USM head coach Jim Carmody, went against Baylis most days in practice and says he never faced a better player on game day.

“Jearld could run with the halfbacks and wide receivers. I don’t know what his 40-time was but he was really, really fast. His first step was as quick as anybody at any position,” Steve Carmody said.

No, Carmody said, he has no idea where Baylis got his nickname, The Space Ghost, but he said, “It could have been because trying to block him was like trying to block a ghost. Poof! He was gone, already past you.”

Reggie Collier, who now works as a banker in Hattiesburg, was a year ahead of Baylis at USM. 

Jearld Baylis was often past the blocker before he was touched as was the case with the BC Lions in Canada.

“Jearld was the first of those really big name players that everybody wanted that came to Southern,” Collier said. “He wasn’t a project or a diamond in the rough like I was. He was the man. He was the best high school player in the state when we signed him. Everybody knew who he was when he got here, the No. 1 recruit in Mississippi.”

Collier remembers an early season practice when he was a sophomore and Baylis had just arrived on campus. “We’re scrimmaging, and I am running the option going to my right just turning up the field,” Collier said. “Then, somebody latches onto me from behind, and I am thinking who the hell is that. People didn’t usually get me from behind. Of course, it was Jearld. From day one, he was special.

“I tell people this all the time. We won a whole lot of games back then, beat a lot of really great teams that nobody but us thought we could beat. I always get a lot of credit for that, but Gearld deserves as much credit as anyone. He was as important as anyone. He was the anchor of that defense and, man, we played great defense.”

Because of his size, NFL teams passed on Baylis. He played first in the USFL, then went to Canada and became one of the great defensive players in the history of the Canadian Football League. He was All-Canadian Football League four times, the defensive player of the year on a championship team once.

For whatever reason, Baylis rarely returned to Mississippi, living in Canada, in Baltimore, in Washington state and Oregon in his later years. Details of his death are sketchy, but he had suffered from bouts with pneumonia preceding his death.

Said Don Horn, his teammate at both Callaway and Southern Miss, “Unfortunately, I had lost touch with Jearld, but I’ll never forget him. I promise you this, those of us who played with him — or against him — will never forget Jearld Baylis.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

Data center company plans to invest $10 billion in Meridian

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mississippitoday.org – Michael Goldberg – 2025-01-09 10:33:00

A Dallas-based data center developer will locate its next campus in Meridian, a $10 billion investment in the area, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said Thursday.

The company, Compass Datacenters, will build eight data centers in the Meridian area over eight years, Reeves said. The governor said the data centers would support local businesses and jobs in a fast-growing industry that Mississippi has tried to attract.

“Through our pro-business policies and favorable business environment, we continue to establish our state as an ideal location for high-tech developments by providing the resources needed for innovation and growth,” Reeves said.

Sen. Jeff Tate

The Mississippi Development Authority will certify the company as a data center operator, allowing the company to benefit from several tax exemptions. Compass Datacenters will receive a 10-year state income and franchise tax exemption and a sales and use tax exemption on construction materials and other equipment.

In 2024, Amazon Web Services’ committed to spend $10 billion to construct two data centers in Madison County. Lawmakers agreed to put up $44 million in taxpayer dollars for the project, make a loan of $215 million, and provide numerous tax breaks.

READ MORE: Amazon coming to Mississippi with plans to create jobs … and electricity

Mississippi Power will supply approximately 500 megawatts of power to the Meridian facility, Reeves said. Data centers house computer servers that power numerous digital services, including online shopping, entertainment streaming and file storage.

Republican Sen. Jeff Tate, who represents Lauderdale County, said the investment was a long time coming for the east Mississippi city of Meridian.

“For far too long, Meridian has been the bride’s maid when it came to economic development,” Tate said. “I’m proud that our political, business, and community leaders were able to work together to help welcome this incredible investment.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

On this day in 1967

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mississippitoday.org – Jerry Mitchell – 2025-01-09 07:00:00

Jan. 9, 1967 

Julian Bond with John Lewis, congressman from Georgia, at the Civil Rights Summit at the LBJ Presidential Library in 2014. Credit: Photo by Lauren Gerson/Wikipedia

Civil rights leader Julian Bond was finally seated in the Georgia House. 

He had helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee while a student at Morehouse College along with future Congressman John Lewis. The pair helped institute nonviolence as a deep principle throughout all of the SNCC protests and actions. 

Following Bond’s election in 1965, the Georgia House refused to seat him after he had criticized U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Georgia House was required to seat him. 

“The truth may hurt,” he said, “but it’s the truth.” 

He went on to serve two decades in the Georgia Legislature and even hosted “Saturday Night Live.” In 1971, he became president of the just-formed Southern Poverty Law Center and later served a dozen years as chairman of the national NAACP. 

“The civil rights movement didn’t begin in Montgomery, and it didn’t end in the 1960s,” he said. “It continues on to this very minute.” 

Over two decades at the University of Virginia, he taught more than 5,000 students and led alumni on civil rights journeys to the South. In 2015, he died from complications of vascular disease.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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