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

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. 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.

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
Derrick Simmons: Monday’s Confederate Memorial Day recognition is awful for Mississippians
Editor’s note: This essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.
Each year, in a handful of states, public offices close, flags are lowered and official ceremonies commemorate “Confederate Memorial Day.”
Mississippi is among those handful of states that on Monday will celebrate the holiday intended to honor the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
But let me be clear: celebrating Confederate Memorial Day is not only racist but is bad policy, bad governance and a deep stain on the values we claim to uphold today.
First, there is no separating the Confederacy from the defense of slavery and white supremacy. The Confederacy was not about “states’ rights” in the abstract; it was about the right to own human beings. Confederate leaders themselves made that clear.
Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declared in his infamous “Cornerstone Speech” that the Confederacy was founded upon “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” No amount of revisionist history can erase the fact that the Confederacy’s cause was fundamentally rooted in preserving racial subjugation.
To honor that cause with a state holiday is to glorify a rebellion against the United States fought to defend the indefensible. It is an insult to every citizen who believes in equality and freedom, and it is a cruel slap in the face to Black Americans, whose ancestors endured the horrors of slavery and generations of systemic discrimination that followed.
Beyond its moral bankruptcy, Confederate Memorial Day is simply bad public policy. Holidays are public statements of our values. They are moments when a state, through official sanction, tells its citizens: “This is what we believe is worthy of honor.” Keeping Confederate Memorial Day on the calendar sends a message that a government once committed to denying basic human rights should be celebrated.
That message is not just outdated — it is dangerous. It nurtures the roots of racism, fuels division and legitimizes extremist ideologies that threaten our democracy today.
Moreover, there are real economic and administrative costs to shutting down government offices for this purpose. In a time when states face budget constraints, workforce shortages and urgent civic challenges, it is absurd to prioritize paid time off to commemorate a failed and racist insurrection. Our taxpayer dollars should be used to advance justice, education, infrastructure and economic development — not to prop up a lost cause of hate.
If we truly believe in moving forward together as one people, we must stop clinging to symbols that represent treason, brutality and white supremacy. There is a legislative record that supports this move in a veto-proof majority changing the state Confederate flag in 2020. Taking Confederate Memorial Day off our official state holiday calendar is another necessary step toward a more inclusive and just society.
Mississippi had the largest population of enslaved individuals in 1865 and today has the highest percentage of Black residents in the United States. We should not honor the Confederacy or Confederate Memorial Day. We should replace it.
Replacing a racist holiday with one that celebrates emancipation underscores the state’s rich African American history and promotes a more inclusive understanding of its past. It would also align the state’s observances with national efforts to commemorate the end of slavery and the ongoing pursuit of equality.
I will continue my legislative efforts to replace Confederate Memorial Day as a state holiday with Juneteenth, which commemorates the freedom for America’s enslaved people.
It’s time to end Confederate Memorial Day once and for all.
Derrick T. Simmons, D-Greensville, serves as the minority leader in the state Senate. He represents Bolivar, Coahoma and Washington counties in the Mississippi Senate.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The post Derrick Simmons: Monday's Confederate Memorial Day recognition is awful for Mississippians appeared first on mississippitoday.org
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Left-Leaning
This article argues against the celebration of Confederate Memorial Day, stating it glorifies a racist and failed rebellion that is harmful to societal values. It critiques the holiday as a symbol of white supremacy and advocates for replacing it with Juneteenth to honor emancipation. The language used, such as referring to the Confederate cause as “moral bankruptcy,” and the call to replace the holiday reflects a progressive stance on social justice and racial equality, common in left-leaning perspectives. Additionally, the writer urges action for inclusivity and justice, positioning the argument within modern liberal values.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois urged active resistance to racist policies
April 27, 1903

W.E.B. Du Bois, in his book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” called for active resistance to racist policies: “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.”
He described the tension between being Black and being an American: “One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
He criticized Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Six years later, Du Bois helped found the NAACP and became the editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis. He waged protests against the racist silent film “The Birth of a Nation” and against lynchings of Black Americans, detailing the 2,732 lynchings between 1884 and 1914.
In 1921, he decried Harvard University’s decisions to ban Black students from the dormitories as an attempt to renew “the Anglo-Saxon cult, the worship of the Nordic totem, the disenfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea Islander — the world rule of Nordic white through brute force.”
In 1929, he debated Lothrop Stoddard, a proponent of scientific racism, who also happened to belong to the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender’s front page headline read, “5,000 Cheer W.E.B. DuBois, Laugh at Lothrup Stoddard.”
In 1949, the FBI began to investigate Du Bois as a “suspected Communist,” and he was indicted on trumped-up charges that he had acted as an agent of a foreign state and had failed to register. The government dropped the case after Albert Einstein volunteered to testify as a character witness.
Despite the lack of conviction, the government confiscated his passport for eight years. In 1960, he recovered his passport and traveled to the newly created Republic of Ghana. Three years later, the U.S. government refused to renew his passport, so Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana. He died on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
Jim Hood’s opinion provides a roadmap if lawmakers do the unthinkable and can’t pass a budget
On June 30, 2009, Sam Cameron, the then-executive director of the Mississippi Hospital Association, held a news conference in the Capitol rotunda to publicly take his whipping and accept his defeat.
Cameron urged House Democrats, who had sided with the Hospital Association, to accept the demands of Republican Gov. Haley Barbour to place an additional $90 million tax on the state’s hospitals to help fund Medicaid and prevent the very real possibility of the program and indeed much of state government being shut down when the new budget year began in a few hours. The impasse over Medicaid and the hospital tax had stopped all budget negotiations.
Barbour watched from a floor above as Cameron publicly admitted defeat. Cameron’s decision to swallow his pride was based on a simple equation. He told news reporters, scores of lobbyists and health care advocates who had set up camp in the Capitol as midnight on July 1 approached that, while he believed the tax would hurt Mississippi hospitals, not having a Medicaid budget would be much more harmful.
Just as in 2009, the Legislature ended the 2025 regular session earlier this month without a budget agreement and will have to come back in special session to adopt a budget before the new fiscal year begins on July 1. It is unlikely that the current budget rift between the House and Senate will be as dramatic as the 2009 standoff when it appeared only hours before the July 1 deadline that there would be no budget. But who knows what will result from the current standoff? After all, the current standoff in many ways seems to be more about political egos than policy differences on the budget.
The fight centers around multiple factors, including:
- Whether legislation will be passed to allow sports betting outside of casinos.
- Whether the Senate will agree to a massive projects bill to fund local projects throughout the state.
- Whether leaders will overcome hard feelings between the two chambers caused by the House’s hasty final passage of a Senate tax cut bill filled with typos that altered the intent of the bill without giving the Senate an opportunity to fix the mistakes.
- Whether members would work on a weekend at the end of the session. The Senate wanted to, the House did not.
It is difficult to think any of those issues will rise to the ultimate level of preventing the final passage of a budget when push comes to shove.
But who knows? What we do know is that the impasse in 2009 created a guideline of what could happen if a budget is not passed.
It is likely that parts, though not all, of state government will shut down if the Legislature does the unthinkable and does not pass a budget for the new fiscal year beginning July 1.
An official opinion of the office of Attorney General Jim Hood issued in 2009 said if there is no budget passed by the Legislature, those services mandated in the Mississippi Constitution, such as a public education system, will continue.
According to the Hood opinion, other entities, such as the state’s debt, and court and federal mandates, also would be funded. But it is likely that there will not be funds for Medicaid and many other programs, such as transportation and aspects of public safety that are not specifically listed in the Mississippi Constitution.
The Hood opinion reasoned that the Mississippi Constitution is the ultimate law of the state and must be adhered to even in the absence of legislative action. Other states have reached similar conclusions when their legislatures have failed to act, the AG’s opinion said.
As is often pointed out, the opinion of the attorney general does not carry the weight of law. It serves only as a guideline, though Gov. Tate Reeves has relied on the 2009 opinion even though it was written by the staff of Hood, who was Reeves’ opponent in the contentious 2019 gubernatorial campaign.
But if the unthinkable ever occurs and the Legislature goes too far into a new fiscal year without adopting a budget, it most likely will be the courts — moreso than an AG’s opinion — that ultimately determine if and how state government operates.
In 2009 Sam Cameron did not want to see what would happen if a budget was not adopted. It also is likely that current political leaders do not want to see the results of not having a budget passed before July 1 of this year.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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