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

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.

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.

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.

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.
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Mississippi Today
Meet Willye B. White: A Mississippian we should all celebrate
In an interview years and years ago, the late Willye B. White told me in her warm, soothing Delta voice, “A dream without a plan is just a wish. As a young girl, I had a plan.”
She most definitely did have a plan. And she executed said plan, as we shall see.
And I know what many readers are thinking: “Who the heck was Willye B. White?” That, or: “Willye B. White, where have I heard that name before?”
Well, you might have driven an eight-mile, flat-as-a-pancake stretch of U.S. 49E, between Sidon and Greenwood, and seen the marker that says: “Willye B. White Memorial Highway.” Or you might have visited the Olympic Room at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and seen where White was a five-time participant and two-time medalist in the Summer Olympics as a jumper and a sprinter.
If you don’t know who Willye B. White was, you should. Every Mississippian should. So pour yourself a cup of coffee or a glass of iced tea, follow along and prepare to be inspired.
Willye B. White was born on the last day of 1939 in Money, near Greenwood, and was raised by grandparents. As a child, she picked cotton to help feed her family. When she wasn’t picking cotton, she was running, really fast, and jumping, really high and really long distances.
She began competing in high school track and field meets at the age of 10. At age 11, she scored enough points in a high school meet to win the competition all by herself. At age 16, in 1956, she competed in the Summer Olympics at Melbourne, Australia.
Her plan then was simple. The Olympics, on the other side of the world, would take place in November. “I didn’t know much about the Olympics, but I knew that if I made the team and I went to the Olympics, I wouldn’t have to pick cotton that year. I was all for that.”
Just imagine. You are 16 years old, a high school sophomore, a poor Black girl. You are from Money, Mississippi, and you walk into the stadium at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds to compete before a crowd of more than 100,000 strangers nearly 10,000 miles from your home.
She competed in the long jump. She won the silver medal to become the first-ever American to win a medal in that event. And then she came home to segregated Mississippi, to little or no fanfare. This was the year after Emmett Till, a year younger than White, was brutally murdered just a short distance from where she lived.
“I used to sit in those cotton fields and watch the trains go by,” she once told an interviewer. “I knew they were going to some place different, some place into the hills and out of those cotton fields.”
Her grandfather had fought in France in World War I. “He told me about all the places he saw,” White said. “I always wanted to travel and see the places he talked about.”
Travel, she did. In the late 1950s there were two colleges that offered scholarships to young, Black female track and field athletes. One was Tuskegee in Alabama, the other was Tennessee State in Nashville. White chose Tennessee State, she said, “because it was the farthest away from those cotton fields.”
She was getting started on a track and field career that would take her, by her own count, to 150 different countries across the globe. She was the best female long jumper in the U.S. for two decades. She competed in Olympics in Melbourne, Rome, Tokyo, Mexico City and Munich. She would compete on more than 30 U.S. teams in international events. In 1999, Sports Illustrated named her one of the top 100 female athletes of the 20th century.
Chicago became White’s home for most of adulthood. This was long before Olympic athletes were rich, making millions in endorsements and appearance fees. She needed a job, so she became a nurse. Later on, she became an public health administrator as well as a coach. She created the Willye B. White Foundation to help needy children with health and after school care.
In 1982, at age 42, she returned to Mississippi to be inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and was welcomed back to a reception at the Governor’s Mansion by Gov. William Winter, who introduced her during induction ceremonies. Twenty-six years after she won the silver medal at Melbourne, she called being hosted and celebrated by the governor of her home state “the zenith of her career.”
Willye B. White died of pancreatic cancer in a Chicago hospital in 2007. While working on an obituary/column about her, I talked to the late, great Ralph Boston, the three-time Olympic long jump medalist from Laurel. They were Tennessee State and U.S. Olympic teammates. They shared a healthy respect from one another, and Boston clearly enjoyed talking about White.
At one point, Ralph asked me, “Did you know Willye B. had an even more famous high school classmate.”
No, I said, I did not.
“Ever heard of Morgan Freeman?” Ralph said, laughing.
Of course.
“I was with Morgan one time and I asked him if he ever ran track,” Ralph said, already chuckling about what would come next.
“Morgan said he did not run track in high school because he knew if he ran, he’d have to run against Willye B. White, and Morgan said he didn’t want to lose to a girl.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session
Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting.
Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.
The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID.
The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots.
The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion.
Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor.
England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking.
The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber.
England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.
“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said.
Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting.
To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice.
Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures.
Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate
Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.
House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.
The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.
Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.
“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”
Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.
“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”
The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.
The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.
The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.
People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.
The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.
“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.”
If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.
Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.
Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.
The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature.
During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube.
As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.
“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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