Connect with us

Mississippi Today

Millions were supposed to go to Mississippi’s hospitals. Getting that money will be difficult for most, and impossible for others

Published

on

What should have been a lifeline for Mississippi’s struggling hospitals is proving to be out of reach for the facilities that need it the most. 

State lawmakers approved sending millions of dollars to save Mississippi’s struggling hospitals during the session, but now many hospital leaders are running into difficulties trying to access that money.

A third of Mississippi’s rural hospitals are at risk of closure — many of them were counting on the state grants to survive the year. 

Legislators in February established the grant program, part of Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann’s plan to “save rural hospitals,” in lieu of expanding Medicaid. A month later and just days before the end of the legislative session, they decided on the amount: $103 million to be disseminated among the state’s struggling health care providers.

It was millions less than the Mississippi Hospital Association had advocated for — despite a $4 billion surplus in the state budget — but health care leaders said they would take what they could get.

Hospitals were allocated varying amounts through a formula that accounted for bed counts, hospital designation, emergency rooms and other factors.

But there was a hitch — the money wouldn’t come from the state general fund. Instead, it would come from American Rescue Plan Act funds, federal money meant to ease the financial hits taken by the pandemic. 

Timothy H. Moore is the President/CEO of the Mississippi Hospital Association. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today

MHA director Tim Moore, whose organization helped craft the program, said it wasn’t clear then how much the source of the money would affect hospitals’ ability to access it.

“I think the Legislature felt that it would not be a problem … to get the money out,” he said. “We were looking at them actually cutting grant checks to the hospitals. When ARPA money was applied, that changed the whole thing.”

ARPA funds can only be used to cover COVID-related expenses, and many hospitals have already claimed those federal pandemic reimbursement dollars. Expenses claimed through ARPA cannot have been claimed under any other federal and state reimbursement programs, rendering the grant money useless to many Mississippi hospitals.

According to Paul Black, CEO of Winston Medical Center in Louisville, that makes the grant bill more of a reimbursement bill.

“I don’t know who came up with the bright-eyed idea to use ARPA money, if they did, they definitely did not understand what that meant to this program,” he said. 

“It’s just extremely frustrating that one of the pieces of the legislation … is one thing and the appropriations is something completely different. I don’t understand how they can do that, I really don’t.”

Both Hosemann and Gov. Tate Reeves, who sent out a release emphasizing his role in the program’s passage, declined to comment about the grant situation.

House Public Health Chair Sam Mims, author of House Bill 271 which funded the program, did not respond to a request for comment.

Senate Medicaid Chairman Kevin Blackwell, author of Senate Bill 2372 which established the program, deferred questions about hospitals’ issues with the grant program to state Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney. 

The state health department is tasked with distributing the funds, and because it’s now tied to federal ARPA funds, has to work with the state department of finance and administration to do so, Edney said.

During the bill process, Edney said the health department pointed out the pitfalls of using the ARPA money.

“Federal money … doesn’t take up state resources from other places,” he said. “The downside is it has to follow federal guidelines versus state general funds.”

One of those downsides has already become clear: The allocation based on hospitals’ number of licensed beds has been struck, on account of federal guidelines. That means hospitals, if they get money at all, will definitely be getting less than expected. 

Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, expresses his concerns about a potential state lottery during a special session of the Legislature at the Capitol in Jackson Thursday, August 23, 2018. Credit: Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/ Report for America

Senate Public Health Chair Hob Bryan said he’s received questions about the grant program from hospital officials and others, and that he still doesn’t have all the answers.

“I’ve asked questions, and I’m still confused,” Bryan said. “I talk with A, and A says one thing, then I talk with B, and B says something else.”

“I think there’s a lot of confusion over whether a hospital would have to have already spent money on COVID expenses and can be reimbursed, or whether they can spend in the future. One of the things I’ve been told is that if you are improving things at your hospital to deal with COVID, or to prepare for the next COVID, then you will be eligible under the regulations.

“Hospitals’ reactions appear to be, ‘That’s all well and good, but I’m going broke and this says I can spend more money and get reimbursed, but that doesn’t help me right now,’” Bryan continued.

Bryan said he believes questions and confusion about the program are in part because of the hasty, secretive process Mississippi legislative leaders have used to set budgets in recent years.

“We do everything in secret, and then put it all together at the last minute,” Bryan said. “Transparency, like say, in conference committees and the rest of the process might help, in that issues like this could be identified and addressed before it’s passed. Discussing these things more in the open could provide better results … Of course, we had the House refusing to negotiate on this or anything else because they were holding out for tax cuts, then they tried to do everything in the last 36 ½ minutes.”

Black agreed that hammering out funding details at the last-minute likely contributed to this oversight — an oversight that’ll have grave consequences for state’s hospitals.

“We got all these legislators that are patting themselves on the back for doing something for the hospitals,” Black said. “When it comes out, they didn’t do anything. At least for us to get what was promised in the Senate bill is not what is taking place now.”

Some of the state’s larger hospitals might be able to get their hands on some of the money. But it’s less likely that the state’s smaller, rural hospitals, who are in much more dire financial straits, will be able to.

“The whole intent of this was to help small rural hospitals,” Moore said. “That’s going to be much more of a challenge.”

Winston Medical Center was set to receive a little less than a million through the grant program. Because of the funding complications, the hospital actually won’t get anything at all.

“Unless the Department of Health comes up and finds out some way to get around some of the issues … as things sit right now, there’s no avenue for us to claim any money,” Black said.

The money would’ve been enough to cover about a month’s worth of payroll, Black said, but in the larger scheme of things, it would’ve helped Winston stay open until the end of the year and staunch the “slow bleed.”

Winston, though, is in a far more stable financial state than many other rural hospitals.

Before the grant money and a big credit line approval, Greenwood Leflore Hospital was weeks from shutting down. It’s not clear how the new developments will affect its financial viability.

Greenwood Leflore Hospital’s interim CEO Gary Marchand discusses the challenges facing the hospital at Greenwood Leflore Hospital in Greenwood, Miss., Tuesday, February 14, 2022. Credit: Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today

Gary Marchand, the hospital’s leader, said it was too early in the process to answer Mississippi Today’s questions, but said he believes the complications caused by the ARPA funding will just slow down when the hospital will receive its allocation.

“We understand MSDH is moving quickly,” Marchand said.

Hospitals can apply for the money during a one-month window that starts June 1. Edney said once a hospital’s application is approved, he’s hoping to get the money over immediately.

However, Black is more cynical about the reality of the situation.

“That’s what they said when they passed the bill back in April, and now it’s the end of May going into June,” Black said. “If anybody gets it by September, it’ll be a miracle.”

Unless a special session is called to address the funding issue, Moore and Black are looking toward the next legislative session for help. They’re hoping that most hospitals survive until then and that state leaders come around to seeing the economic advantages to expanding Medicaid in Mississippi, which would bring millions of dollars to the state’s hospitals.

“The analogy I keep thinking about is Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football,” Black said. “Lucy holds the ball for Charlie Brown to kick, and at the last minute, she pulls it back. He falls on his rear end.

“That’s what this has been like.”

Reporter Geoff Pender contributed to this story.

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

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.biloxinewsevents.com/?p=245957

Mississippi Today

On this day in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois urged active resistance to racist policies

Published

on

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-27 07:00:00

April 27, 1903

W.E.B. Du Bois by James E. Purdy in 1907 from the National Portrait Gallery.

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.

Continue Reading

Mississippi Today

Jim Hood’s opinion provides a roadmap if lawmakers do the unthinkable and can’t pass a budget

Published

on

mississippitoday.org – @BobbyHarrison9 – 2025-04-27 06:00:00

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.

Continue Reading

Mississippi Today

1964: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was formed

Published

on

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-26 07:00:00

April 26, 1964

Aaron Henry testifies before the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Civil rights activists started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the state’s all-white regular delegation to the Democratic National Convention. 

The regulars had already adopted this resolution: “We oppose, condemn and deplore the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … We believe in separation of the races in all phases of our society. It is our belief that the separation of the races is necessary for the peace and tranquility of all the people of Mississippi, and the continuing good relationship which has existed over the years.” 

In reality, Black Mississippians had been victims of intimidation, harassment and violence for daring to try and vote as well as laws passed to disenfranchise them. As a result, by 1964, only 6% of Black Mississippians were permitted to vote. A year earlier, activists had run a mock election in which thousands of Black Mississippians showed they would vote if given an opportunity. 

In August 1964, the Freedom Party decided to challenge the all-white delegation, saying they had been illegally elected in a segregated process and had no intention of supporting President Lyndon B. Johnson in the November election. 

The prediction proved true, with white Mississippi Democrats overwhelmingly supporting Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act. While the activists fell short of replacing the regulars, their courageous stand led to changes in both parties.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Continue Reading

Trending