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Mississippi’s child abuse pediatrician works between medicine and the justice system. Can he be objective?

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Mississippi’s child abuse pediatrician works between medicine and the justice system. Can he be objective?

This story is the first part in Mississippi Today’s “Shaky Science, Fractured Families” investigation about the state’s only child abuse pediatrician crossing the line from medicine into law enforcement and how his decisions can tear families apart. Read the full series here.

Dr. Scott Benton arrived in Mississippi in 2008 with a mandate to help ensure the University of Mississippi Medical Center stopped getting sued for failing to diagnose child abuse.

Dr. Dan Jones, then UMMC’s vice chancellor for health affairs, had been troubled by the lawsuits following the hospital’s oversights. Benton would later say that Jones wanted to know what the hospital could do to stop this from happening again.

The answer, in part, was Benton, whom Jones recruited to lead a new organization called the Children’s Justice Center. Based at Children’s of Mississippi in Jackson, the center’s mission is to prevent and identify child abuse and neglect.

Right after he arrived, Benton led a two-year effort to develop a surveillance protocol for the entire hospital. Under the protocol, any child admitted to the hospital with trauma – like cuts or broken bones – is screened for potential abuse.

The center was renamed the Children’s Safe Center and now has branches around the state where children can be examined for signs of abuse.

In the 14 years since Benton arrived in Mississippi, he has helped to change the state’s policies, procedures and resources around child abuse. But the success of his center is difficult to measure as the evaluations he conducts are private, and abuse and neglect cases in youth court are sealed, too.

Benton’s career parallels the growth of a unique medical specialty called child abuse pediatrics. Board-certified child abuse pediatricians must demonstrate knowledge of psychology, forensic medicine, neurology and much more. They say their combination of skills makes them uniquely able to determine when abuse has occurred.

Within children’s hospitals around the country, child abuse pediatricians can investigate caregivers they suspect of abuse, make referrals to child protective services, and testify in criminal proceedings. Their work can save children’s lives, and it may be particularly important in Mississippi, which had the country’s highest rate of child deaths due to abuse or neglect in 2021.

But parents who say they’ve been wrongly accused, some doctors in other specialties, and sometimes even child abuse pediatricians themselves say the specialists can be too quick to allege abuse and insufficiently careful in considering other explanations.

And in Mississippi, where he is the only board-certified child abuse pediatrician, Benton has played a particularly powerful role in determining when parents are investigated for child abuse, with limited oversight or consequences for making accusations that are unsubstantiated.

Mississippi Today has uncovered three instances in recent years where parents allege he got it wrong.In each case, there were other explanations or potential medical conditions for the injuries the children exhibited that were not fully vetted by Benton or his team before their caregivers were accused of child abuse.

Parents are often unclear they are being investigated for child abuse when interacting with Benton and his team, they say. Benton said he and his team introduced themselves as “pediatricians from the Children’s Safe Center.”

Benton, through communications officers at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, declined an interview request regarding this investigation from Mississippi Today. The communications officers responded to a limited number of a detailed list of questions and findings Mississippi Today shared with UMMC before publication and received statements from Benton but few direct responses or refutations.

“We walk a fine line between protecting abused children and protecting innocent parents,” Benton said in a statement. “I’m very cognizant of that. I emphasize that fact with staff, and I take that responsibility very seriously.”

In a separate statement, Dr. Mary Taylor, chair of the UMMC Department of Pediatrics, said Benton is “a respected member of our Medical Center staff” who has earned national certifications.

“As medical director of the Children’s Safe Center, Dr. Benton has the difficult role of evaluating the evidence in cases of suspected child abuse in any form and rendering a decision based on his training, many years of experience and deep knowledge of the medical literature. He and his team of trained child abuse specialists provide evidence-supported medical opinions to many governmental agencies that are tasked with ensuring the safety of children. Often times, these children cannot speak for themselves and Dr. Benton’s medical opinions are one part of a defined system of agencies that examine the totality of available evidence about suspected child abuse with the goal of protecting children from exposure to abusive environments.

“UMMC supports the critical work Dr. Benton does through the Children’s Safe Center and values the service he provides to the state as the only board-certified child abuse pediatrician.”

A pediatrician’s path evolves with a new medical specialty

Benton started his medical career in the 1990s, in his native Louisiana. His path in medicine evolved in tandem with the growth of a new medical specialty in child abuse.

During his second year of residency, he completed a clerkship in “pediatric forensic medicine” — what is now called child abuse pediatrics. He then took a job in pediatrics at the Louisiana State University medical school, which included training at the Center for Child Protection in San Diego, now called the Chadwick Center, and elsewhere.

Benton found himself at the center of a small but increasingly influential field. He became one of the charter members of the Ray E. Helfer Society, an organization of physicians who work on preventing and diagnosing child abuse.

“There’s only a few of us that do this,” he once explained in a deposition. “We recognized that this was building up a body of knowledge that was greater than that of just a general pediatrician… We started thinking that we could possibly have a subspecialty in the late 90s, early 2000s.”

Benton and colleagues applied to the American Board of Pediatrics for the designation.

They argued they offered something unique: an ability to draw together insights from a range of specialties in order to diagnose a crime.

“You have to first show the fund of knowledge, what the factual bases are, you have to compile a full literature, as in any other subspecialty,” Benton said in a 2017 deposition.

In 2009, the board offered a certification exam for the first time. Benton holds certificate number 20 in child abuse pediatrics. Today, there are 330 board-certified child abuse pediatricians across the United States.

Around the country, child abuse pediatricians report suspected abuse and neglect to child protective services, and then may provide evidence to help the state remove a child from his or her family’s custody. In some states, CPS also provides funding for their work.

Their credentials lend their determinations substantial weight in the eyes of CPS caseworkers, police, prosecutors and judges: A Marshall Project analysis found that reports of suspected abuse by medical professionals to child welfare agencies are 40% likelier to be substantiated than reports by non-medical professionals.

A ProPublica and NBC Investigation found thatonly about 5% of child welfare investigationsnationwide lead to determinations of physical or sexual abuse.

And around the country, Black children are disproportionately likely to be investigated. One2017 studyfound that half of all Black children in the US experience a CPS investigation by age 18, compared to less than a quarter of white children.

The three families featured in this series are white.

Benton has testified that his job requires him to “provide service to child protection, law enforcement and Mississippi prosecutors.” He started providing expert testimony soon after he began his medical career, first testifying in a case in September 1996.

Critics of this medical specialty — including defense attorneys and some doctors in other fields — argue that child abuse pediatricians are susceptible to bias because of their frequent and close interactions with law enforcement.

At one conference on shaken baby syndrome and abusive head trauma, a speaker presented defense expert testimony alongside a picture of Pinocchio. The event concluded with doctors and prosecutors singing a song mocking skeptics of the diagnosis to the tune of, “If I only had a brain.”

State public defender André de Gruy drew a parallel between child abuse pediatricians and medical examiners housed in the Department of Public Safety — both are scientists who say their work is objective, but who work closely with law enforcement and prosecutors.That may shape their interpretations.

“I think (Benton) is going to find abuse because he has a bias towards finding abuse, in my opinion,” de Gruy said. “In most of the cases, I suspect he finds abuse and there is abuse. But I think that there are the cases, the close calls, which is where the trouble comes in, where he’s going to find abuse but someone else will look at it and not.”

Child abuse pediatricians and many colleagues in other medical specialties and fields like law enforcement and social work see their work as essential to identifying and intervening in cases of abuse. They say they follow the evidence.

Dr. Christopher Greeley, who leads the child abuse pediatrics team at Texas Children’s Hospital, told NBC News that he and colleagues always work to rule out alternative explanations before making an accusation of abuse.

“We don’t say, ‘Eh, take the kid away,’ in a sort of flippant manner,” he told the news station.

Greeley, a past president of the Helfer Society who also chairs its public relations committee, did not respond to emails from Mississippi Today seeking an interview.

Mississippi’s only child abuse pediatrician builds a new surveillance system

When Benton moved to Mississippi in 2008, the state was under pressure to improve protections for abused children. A federal lawsuit in 2004 charged that the state was failing to prevent abuse and neglect of kids in the foster system. In response, the Legislature created the Children’s Justice Center in 2007, aiming to standardize and professionalize investigations of suspected abuse.

In an interview with the Clarion-Ledger in 2012, Benton explained that while working in New Orleans, he had developed one of the country’s “largest and (most) innovative child abuse programs” with the Audrey Hepburn Children At-Risk Evaluation Center. But in 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed most of his family’s material possessions and left them displaced from their home.

“It was during this time that I was recruited to be the medical director of the (UMMC) center and met with former Gov. Haley Barbour, now Gov. Phil Bryant, numerous legislators, then-University of Mississippi Medical Center Chancellor Dr. Dan Jones, and Pediatrics Chair Dr. Bev Evans,” he told the paper. “This solidified for me that Mississippi was serious about developing an academic forensic medical response for abused and neglected children.”

Benton’s UMMC colleagues welcomed his arrival. Dr. Christopher Blewett, a pediatric surgeon who now works in Missouri, told Mississippi Today that before Benton came to the hospital, the bulk of the work to investigate child abuse and provide evidence during criminal proceedings fell to doctors like him because they were the ones who would see and operate on children with physical trauma sustained from abuse.

Benton, who also lived next door to Blewett when they were both in Mississippi, was “a godsend,” Blewett said. His training equipped him to recognize patterns of injury that could point to abuse, and he largely took over the work of testifying in court.

Blewett said he completely trusts Benton, whom he describes as devoted to his work. He recalled phone calls at 10 p.m. to discuss whether to release a family from the hospital or keep them another day or two so Benton, who frequently travels to testify in court, could interview them in person.

“Obviously it takes a special person to do that work,” Blewett said. “This is just short of like an SVU detective in many cases. It can be pretty grim at times.”

Benton made a similar point during his Clarion-Ledger interview. Other specialists are reluctant “to get involved with the medico-legal evaluation of children,” he told the paper.

Dr. Scott Benton, Mississippi’s only board-certified child abuse pediatrician, discussed his work with the Clarion-Ledger in 2012.

In Mississippi, rates of child maltreatment are higher than the national average. And in recent years, the number of child deaths reportedly caused by abuse and neglect in Mississippi has risen, from 15 deaths in 2007 to 38 in 2020 and 49 in 2021. That year — the most recent year for which such data is available — the state had the country’s highest rate of such deaths, at 7.07 per 100,000 children, compared to a national average of 2.46.

Today, Benton sees patients at the hospital suffering from severe trauma, supervises an outpatient sexual abuse clinic, and examines kids. Child Protective Services, police, lawyers, psychiatrists, pediatricians and emergency rooms refer children to the center.

Benton told Mississippi Today that the state’s child abuse hotline receives about 30,000 calls annually, and about a third of these are substantiated. The Safe Center saw 2,400 children last year, he said.

He also implemented a “high-risk surveillance system,” under which Benton’s team evaluates any child who comes to UMMC with certain injuries or symptoms. The triggers for such evaluation are wide-ranging, according to procedures obtained by Mississippi Today. They include any bone fractures, burns including “significant sunburns” and “all trauma warranting admission.”

Benton’s mandate was to ensure hospital staff missed no warning signs for abuse.

“The general teaching previous to that time was not adequate to keep an open mind about whether parents or caregivers could be abusers,” he told attorneys for a defendant in a fatal child abuse case during a deposition.

The stakes are high on either side, he said. While an incorrect accusation can have serious consequences for a parent, failing to detect abuse can put a child’s life at risk.

“I do think we try to get it right, and I’m not aware that there’s any overcalling going on,” he said. “Nationally, if you look at the statistics on the epidemiology, it’s always the opposite direction. We just take the person at hand and don’t go any further.”

Benton has emphasized that the protocol for reviewing cases he implemented provides protections for caregivers and a systematic exploration of potential causes of injury.

“Before I came here, anyone they thought who had injured the kid was kicked out of the hospital,” he told a group of Mississippi public defenders a decade ago in a recorded presentation Mississippi Today reviewed.

“That was part of their protocol. And I said, ‘Alright, who am I supposed to get the history from? Who am I supposed to figure out whether there’s a medical explanation for… some of these bleeding findings? So we quickly reversed that… We had to have multiple conferences to explain to them a concept you already understand: innocent until proven guilty … We’ve got several kids where we’ve made medical diagnoses where the nurses were like ‘Oh my God, I was ready to crucify this parent,’ and the kid turned out to have a (inaudible) aneurysm in their brain that was mimicking head trauma.”

In an email to Mississippi Today, Benton said the surveillance system does not give him total decision-making power in every case.

“The high-risk surveillance system is a review of other professionals (sic) work and is not an independent investigation by the children’s safe center,” he wrote. “However, if I feel by review that a case should be reported for state CPS investigation, I contact the medical provider involved in the case or the child’s primary care provider and discuss my concerns with them. It is up to them at that point whether they agree with my concerns. This interaction is documented in the child’s medical record.”

It is not clear whether Benton meant that the other medical providers in the case must make the decision to involve CPS. He and UMMC communications officials repeatedly declined Mississippi Today’s interview requests and responded directly to only a small number of questions sent via email.

When Mississippi Today asked for clarification on this particular point, UMMC did not respond.

The law gives doctors and law enforcement an incentive to allege abuse any time it appears possible. It protects people who make a good faith report of abuse or neglect from any liability if they get it wrong, while failure to report can lead to a fine and up to a year in prison.

But Benton has said keeping “an open mind” does not mean jumping to conclusions about whether abuse has occurred. The Clarion-Ledger asked him what adults should do if they suspect a child is being abused.

“My first advice would be to not overreact,” Benton said. “Listen to the child.”

He encouraged “passive listening,” in which a caregiver repeats back what a child says in a questioning tone.

“Then be silent and wait for further response,” he said.

Once you suspect abuse, call the state child abuse hotline.

He also pointed to social factors that can contribute to abuse, like caregivers being out of work, displaced, or otherwise stressed. And most physical abuse, he said, is related to “inadequate parenting skills coupled with frustration.” Benton added that stressful situations involving feeding, crying and misbehavior could cause “an otherwise sane caregiver to lose patience.”

As the doctor charged with accusing caregivers of child abuse, Benton is acquainted with angry denials and furious criticism.

“My experience has been over the years that I’m often called a liar or told that I misrepresent what people say to me, so I always audio record my conversations,” he said on the stand during a 2014 trial. “That way no one can say I said something I didn’t, you know, and it protects the other person.”

Two of the mothers featured in this series attempted to obtain the recordings of their conversations with Benton in the hospital but were unable. One was told she must have an attorney, and the other could not get in touch with an employee of the Children’s Safe Center, where the recordings are housed.

A controversial diagnosis

Child abuse pediatricians like Benton are trained to recognize signs of abusive head trauma, formerly known as shaken baby syndrome (SBS), and often provide expert testimony in trials. For decades, three findings were considered indicative of the syndrome: subdural bleeding, retinal bleeding and swelling of the brain.

Questions about abusive head trauma comprise 10% of the certifying exam for child abuse pediatricians, more than almost any other topic on the exam. (Child fatalities and musculoskeletal injuries comprise 4% and 8% of the exam, respectively.)

Thousands of people in the U.S. have been convicted of shaking a baby to death since the 1970s.

Yet the scientific bases of the diagnosis are increasingly coming under question. A 1987 study reviewed 48 cases of “shaken baby syndrome” in the Philadelphia area and found that of the 13 fatalities, all had signs of impact, too. Biomechanical studies, including one published in 2022, have also found that forceful shaking of an infant will cause injury to the neck before the brain, although neck injuries have not been considered diagnostic of the syndrome.

Retinal hemorrhage, once regarded as conclusive proof of the syndrome, has been seen in infants who died from causes like meningitis or an obstructed airway.

Researchers have also found that short falls can generate much more force than shaking, and a 2001 study that looked at children’s falls from playground equipment — but did not include infants — found that short falls could cause death, as well as retinal bleeding, and could be preceded by a lucid interval.

Critics of these studies say biomechanical models are not real infants. It’s impossible to test the theory on babies.

The dispute over the science plays out in courtrooms around the country. The Washington Post reported in 2015 that at least 16 people in the U.S. had overturned their convictions since 2001, as judges determined that new information created reasonable doubt as to their guilt.

Indeed, a 2018 “consensus statement” published in the journal Pediatric Radiology was written in response to what the authors described as “speculative theories that cannot be reconciled with generally accepted medical literature” now being advanced during trials. The statement explained the injuries could be caused by shaking alone, shaking and impact, or impact alone.

“There is no controversy concerning the medical validity of the existence of AHT, with multiple components including subdural hematoma, intracranial and spinal changes, complex retinal hemorrhages, and rib and other fractures that are inconsistent with the provided mechanism of trauma,” the statement said.

The idea that shaking alone could cause fatal injuries in infants was introduced in 1971 by British pediatric neurosurgeon Norman Guthkelch. He published a two-page paper in the British Medical Journal titled “Infantile Subdural Haematoma and its Relationship to Whiplash Injuries” that established the link between shaking and head injuries in infants.

With his research, Guthkelch was attempting to solve a problem he kept encountering in his practice. Small children showed up to the hospital where he worked with bleeding on the surface of their brains, but with no broken bones or bruises to indicate they had been abused. He reviewed 23 cases of alleged child abuse, with subdural hematoma in 13. In five of those cases, there was no external sign of injury, and Guthkelch theorized their injuries could have been caused by shaking.

In the years that followed, doctors were trained to strongly suspect abuse if children came in with subdural hematomas, brain swelling and bleeding in the retinas. A guide to investigating child abuse published by the Justice Department in the late 1990s called retinal hemorrhage in babies “for all practical purposes, conclusive evidence of shaken baby syndrome in the absence of a good explanation.”

Prosecutors have won convictions with no eyewitnesses to the alleged shaking and no theory as to why the defendant would shake the infant, with little evidence beyond a doctor’s diagnosis based on a supposedly definitive set of symptoms.

For prosecutors, shaken baby syndrome provides a tidy narrative: It is “a medical diagnosis for murder,” as Deborah Tuerkheimer, a law professor at Northwestern University and expert on shaken baby syndrome convictions put it in her 2009 article in the Washington University Law Review.

In 1996, Wisconsin day care provider Audrey Edmunds was convicted of murder in the death of a 7-month-old baby in her care. The prosecution’s argument hinged on what was then regarded as medical fact: The presence of retinal hemorrhage, subdural bleeding and brain swelling — plus the absence of another explanation for those findings — provided a powerful indication the baby had been shaken. And the timing of the baby’s decline purportedly proved Edmunds was responsible. Her defense did not challenge the science around shaken baby syndrome.

In 2008, however, Edmunds was granted a new trial. A judge determined that “a shift in mainstream medical opinion” on shaken baby syndrome meant a new jury could have reasonable doubt as to her guilt. The district attorney dropped the charges, and Edmunds was freed.

The outcome cast a spotlight on the controversy brewing over the diagnosis.

Guthketlch himself went on to express horror that prosecutors were using the diagnosis he had popularized to convict parents and caregivers when there was no other evidence of abuse. He spent the final years of his life reviewing controversial SBS cases and noted a high proportion of the children in them had a history of underlying illnesses or conditions that could explain their injuries, but that these issues were rarely considered in medical reports.

“While society is rightly shocked by any assault on its weakest members and demands retribution, there seem to have been instances in which both medical science and the law have gone too far in hypothesizing and criminalizing alleged acts of violence in which the only evidence has been the presence of the classic triad or even just one or two of its elements,” Gulthkelch wrote in a paper published in the Houston Journal of Health Law & Policy in 2012. “Often, there seems to have been inadequate inquiry into the possibility that the picture resulted from natural causes.”

In 2009, the American Association of Pediatrics issued a policy statement recommending doctors stop using the term “shaken baby syndrome” and instead use “abusive head trauma,” a terminology shift to describe the clinical findings instead of the mechanism of injury. The statement said injuries could be caused by shaking, impact, or some combination of both.

To critics, the name change presents an obvious problem: If the injuries can also be caused by impact, and defendants’ accounts of what happened describe an accidental impact, how can doctors be certain the injuries were caused by abuse?

Child abuse pediatricians say the science of abusive head trauma is sound, and that when a child has a specific set of symptoms, a different diagnosis is unlikely. They argue that critics of the diagnosis are putting kids at risk.

“The controversy exists among just a few individuals predominantly traveling on the defense circuit, some of whom are making $600,000 a year providing testimony that is factually scientifically counterintuitive, counter science,” Benton said in one sentencing hearing in 2018, “so I wouldn’t call that controversy when the people — I mean, you’re making it as if it’s balanced. Is it controversy? Yes, we’re very upset when somebody misuses science in the furtherance of a child who in our estimation has been abused.”

Reading a newspaper, finding a homicide

When Benton arrived in Mississippi, he understood the Children’s Justice Center had a decade of guaranteed funding thanks to the state’s $100 million settlement with WorldCom Inc., a telecommunications company that collapsed in a multibillion-dollar fraud scandal. It turned out that was a drastic overestimate. Instead, he had a few years’ worth of funding, and he had to look for other revenue streams.

That was how the case of a man named Jeffrey Havard first came across his desk. Havard was convicted of capital murder in the death of his girlfriend’s 6-month-old daughter in 2002, and sentenced to death. The prosecution’s theory was that Havard had sexually assaulted the baby and shaken her to death.

The director of the center read a story in the Clarion Ledger about Havard’s case by longtime investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell. The state Supreme Court had just rejected an appeal from Havard, but Mitchell had interviewed a pathologist who reviewed medical records and concluded there was no evidence of sexual assault or of homicide, and that the baby’s injuries were consistent with Havard’s claim that he had dropped her.

The center’s director thought Benton could potentially apply his expertise to the case. Helping to right an injustice might boost name recognition and funding for the center.

But Benton didn’t see an injustice.

“As I read the facts as put forth in the above sources,” he wrote to Mitchell on March 15, 2012, referring to the newspaper article and the state Supreme Court decision upholding Havard’s conviction, “I believe they support a homicide.”

Dr. Scott Benton emailed Jerry Mitchell, then a reporter at the Clarion-Ledger, after reading one of his articles about Jeffrey Havard’s case in 2012.

Mississippi Today health editor Kate Royals contributed to this report.

Editor’s note: Kate Royals, Mississippi Today’s community health editor since January 2022, worked as a writer/editor for UMMC’s Office of Communications from November 2018 through August 2020, writing press releases and features about the medical center’s schools of dentistry and nursing.


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

Mississippi Today

Pharmacy benefit manager reform likely dead

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mississippitoday.org – Gwen Dilworth – 2025-04-01 17:26:00

Hotly contested legislation that aimed to increase the transparency and regulation of pharmacy benefit managers appeared dead in the water Tuesday after a lawmaker challenged the bill for a rule violation.

The bill was sent back to conference after Rep. John Hines, D-Greenville, raised a point of order challenging the addition of code sections to the bill, which will likely kill it. 

House members in the past have chosen to turn a blind eye to the rule, which would require the added code sections to be removed when the bill is returned to conference. This fatal flaw will make it difficult to revive the legislation. 

“It will almost certainly die,” said House Speaker Jason White, who authored the legislation. “And you can celebrate that with your pharmacist when you see them.”

“…This wasn’t ‘gotcha.’ Everybody in this chamber knew that code sections were added, because the attempt was to make 1123 more suitable to all the parties.”

The bill sought to protect patients and independent pharmacists, who have warned that if legislators do not pass a law this year to regulate pharmacy benefit managers, which serve as middlemen in the pharmaceutical industry, some pharmacies may be forced to close. They say that the companies’ low payments and unfair business practices have left them struggling to break even.

The bill underwent several revisions in the House and Senate before reaching its most recent form, which independent pharmacists say has watered the bill down and will not offer them adequate protection. 

House Bill 1123, authored by White, originally focused on the transparency of pharmacy benefit managers. The Senate then beefed up the bill by adding provisions barring the companies from steering patients to affiliate pharmacies and prohibiting spread pricing – the practice of paying insurers more for drugs than pharmacists in order to inflate pharmacy benefit managers’ profits. 

House Speaker Jason White brings the House of Representatives to order at the beginning of the new legislative session at the State Capitol, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025 in Jackson.

Independent pharmacists, who have flocked to the Capitol to advocate for reform this session, widely supported the Senate’s version of the bill. 

The Senate incorporated several recommendations from the House into its bill, saying that they believed that the legislation would have the House’s support. 

Instead, the House sent the bill to conference and requested additional changes, including new language that would eliminate self-funded insurance plans, or health plans in which employers assume the financial risk of covering employees’ health care costs themselves, from a section of the bill that prohibits pharmacy benefit managers from steering patients to specific pharmacies.

This language seeks to satisfy employers, who argue that regulating pharmacy benefit managers’ business practices will lead to higher health insurance costs. 

Sen. Rita Parks, R-Corinth, who has spearheaded pharmacy benefit manager reform efforts in the Senate, previously said that adding the language to the bill would “remove any protection out of the law.” But she signed the conference report that included the language Monday after a heated conference meeting between lawmakers. 

Rep. Hank Zuber, R-Ocean Springs and co-author of the bill, said the bill has something for everybody, gesturing to its concessions for employers and independent pharmacists. He said the bill gives independent pharmacists 85% of what they wanted. 

Mississippi Independent Pharmacies Association director Robert Dozier was not available for comment by the time the story published. 

Zuber told House members Tuesday to “blame the Senate” for the slow progress of pharmacy benefit manager reform in Mississippi, citing the body’s failure to take up a drug pricing transparency bill half a decade ago, for three years in a row.

“If the Senate had followed the leadership and the legislation that we drafted those many years ago, we would not be here,” Zuber said. “We would have the information on drug pricing, we would have the information and transparency on (pharmacy benefit managers) and we would have the ultimate reason as to why drug costs continue to rise.”

Members of the House expressed dissatisfaction with the legislation Tuesday, arguing it did not do enough to ensure lower prescription drug costs for consumers. 

“I’m going to try to do something next year that goes even further,” Zuber responded.

For the past several years, lawmakers have proposed bills to regulate pharmacy benefit managers, but none have made it as far as this session. 

“We’ll go another year,” said White. 

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

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Mississippi Today

Feuding GOP lawmakers prepare to leave Jackson without a budget, let governor force them back

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-01 19:23:00

After months of bitter Republican political infighting, the Legislature appears likely to end its session Wednesday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown if they don’t come back and adopt one by June 30. 

After the House adjourned Tuesday night, Speaker Jason White said he had presented the Senate with a final offer to extend the session, which would give the two chambers more time to negotiate a budget. As for now, the 100 or so bills that make up the state budget are dead.

The Senate leadership was expected to meet and consider the offer Tuesday evening, White said. But numerous senators both Republican and Democrat said they would oppose such a parliamentary resolution, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has also said it’s unlikely and that the governor will have to force lawmakers back into special session.

White said he believes, if the Senate would agree to extend the session and restart negotiations, lawmakers could pass a budget and end the 2025 session by Sunday, only a few days later than planned.

But if the Senate chooses not to pass a resolution extending the session, White said the House would end the session on Wednesday.

It would take a two-thirds vote of support in both chambers to suspend the rules and extend the session. The Senate opposition appears to be enough to prevent that. 

Still, the speaker said he believes Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and Senate leaders are considering the proposal. But he said if he doesn’t hear a positive response by Wednesday, the House will adjourn and wait for Gov. Tate Reeves to call a special session at a later date. 

“We are open to (extending the session), but we will not stay here until Sunday waiting around to see if they might do it,” White said.  

White said leaving the Capitol without a budget and punting the issue to a special session might not cool tensions between the chambers, as some lawmakers hope. 

“I think when you leave here and you end up in a special session, some folks say, ‘Well everybody that’s upset will cool down by then.’ They may, or it may get worse. It may shine a different and specific light on some of the things in this budget and the differences in the House and Senate,” White said. “Whereas, I think everybody now is in the legislative mode, and we might get there.”

The Mississippi Constitution does not grant the governor much power, but if Gov. Tate Reeves calls lawmakers into a special session, he gets to set the specific legislative agenda — not lawmakers. 

White said the governor could potentially use his executive authority to direct lawmakers to take up other bills, such as those related to education, before getting to the budget. 

“When we leave here without a budget, it is entirely the governor’s prerogative to when he (sets a special session) and how he does that.”

While the future of the state’s budget hangs in the balance, lawmakers have spent the remaining days of their regular session trying to pass the few remaining bills that remained alive on their calendars. 

House approves DEI ban, Senate could follow suit on Wednesday 

The House on Tuesday passed a proposal to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs from public schools, and both chambers approved a measure to establish a form of early voting. 

The House approved a conference report compromise to ban DEI programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from K-12 schools, community colleges and universities. If the Senate follows suit, Mississippi would join a number of other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump, who has made rooting DEI out of the federal government one of his top priorities. 

The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers follows hours of heated debate in which Democrats, all almost of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. Legislative Republicans argued the legislation will elevate merit in education and remove from school settings “divisive concepts” that exacerbate divisions among different identity groups. 

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 act, but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law, but only after they go through an internal campus review process that would give schools time to make changes. The legislation could also withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. 

Legislature sends ‘early voting lite’ bill to governor 

The Legislature also overwhelmingly passed a proposal to establish a watered down version of early voting, though the legislation is titled “in-person excused voting,” and not early voting.

The proposal establishes 22 days of in-person voting before Election Day that requires voters to go to the circuit clerk’s office or another location county officials have designated as a secure early voting facility, such as a courtroom or a board of supervisors meeting room. 

To cast an early vote, someone must present a valid form of photo ID and list one of about 15 legal excuses to vote before Election Day. The excuses, however, are broad and would, in theory, allow many people to cast early ballots. 

Examples of valid excuses are voters expecting to work on Election Day, being at least 65 years old, being currently enrolled in college or potentially travelling outside of their county on Election Day. 

Since most eligible voters either work, go to college or are older than 65 years of age, these excuses would apply to almost everyone. 

“Even though this isn’t early voting as we saw originally, it makes this more convenient for hard working Mississippians to go by their clerks’ office and vote in person after showing an ID 22 days prior to an election,” Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England said. 

Republican Gov. Tate Reeves opposes early voting, so it’s unclear if he would sign the measure into law or veto it. 

Both chambers are expected to gavel at 10 a.m. on Wednesday to debate the final items on their agenda. 

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

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‘A lot of us are confused’: Lacking info, some Jacksonians go to wrong polling place

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mississippitoday.org – @mintamolly – 2025-04-01 18:43:00

Johnny Byrd knew that when his south Jackson neighborhood Carriage Hills changed wards during redistricting last year, his neighbors would have trouble finding their correct polling place on Election Day.

So he bought a poster board and inscribed it with their new voting location – Christ Tabernacle Church.

“I made a sign and placed it in front of the entrance to our neighborhood that told them exactly where to go so there would be no confusion,” said Byrd, vice president of the Association of South Jackson Neighborhoods.

Still, on April 1, a car full of voters from a senior living facility who should have gone to Christ Tabernacle were driven to their old polling place. 

“I thought it was unfortunate they had to get there and find out rather than knowing in advance that their polling location was different,” said Sen. Sollie Norwood, a Democrat from Jackson who was on the ground Tuesday helping constituents with voting.

One of those elderly women became frustrated and said she no longer wanted to vote, Norwood said, though her companions tried to convince her otherwise. By midday Tuesday, 300 people had voted at Christ Tabernacle, one of the city’s largest precincts currently in terms of registered voters, but among the lowest in turnout historically.

Voting rights advocates and candidates vying for municipal office in Jackson are keeping an eye on issues facing voters at the polls, though without official results, it remains to be seen if that will dampen turnout this election with the hotly contested Democratic primary.

“I still believed it was gonna be low,” Monica McInnis, a program manager for the nonprofit OneVoice, said of turnout. “I was expecting it would be a little higher because of what is on the ballot and how many people are running in all of the wards as well as the mayor’s race.”

A daughter helps her mother casts her votes as mayoral candidate John Horhn chats with voter at Christ Tabernacle Church in south Jackson, Tuesday, April 1, 2025.

The situation is evolving as the day goes on, but the main issues are twofold. One, thousands of Jackson voters have new precinct locations after redistricting last year put them into a new city council ward. 

Two, some voters didn’t realize their polling place for the municipal elections may differ from where they voted in last year’s national elections, which are run by the counties. 

In Mississippi, voters are assigned two precincts that are often but not always the same: A municipal location for city elections and a county location for senate, gubernatorial and presidential elections 

“People in Mississippi, we go to the same polling location for three years, and that fourth year, it changes,” said Jada Barnes, an organizer with the Jackson-based nonprofit MS Votes. “A lot of us are confused. When people are going to the polling place today, they’re seeing it is closed, so they’re just going back home which is making turnout go even lower.” 

Barnes said she’s hearing this primarily from a few Jackson voters who called a hotline that MS Votes is manning. Lack of awareness around polling locations is a big deterrent, she said, because most people are trying to squeeze their vote in between work, school or family responsibilities. 

“Maybe you’re on your lunch break, you only got 30 minutes to go vote, you learn that your polling location has changed and now you have to go back to work,” she said. 

Norwood said he heard from a group of students assigned to vote at Christ Tabernacle who had attempted to vote at the wrong precinct and were told their names weren’t on the rolls. They didn’t know they had been moved from Ward 4 to Ward 6, Norwood said, meaning they expected to vote in a different council race until reaching the polls Tuesday.

Though voters have a duty to be informed of their polling location, Barnes said city and circuit clerks and local election commissioners are ultimately responsible for making sure voters know where to go on Election Day. 

Angela Harris, the Jackson municipal clerk, said her office worked to inform voters by mailing out thousands of letters to Jacksonians whose precincts changed, including the roughly 6,000 whose wards changed during the 2024 redistricting. 

“I am over-swamped,” she said yesterday. 

Despite her efforts, at least one voter said he never got a letter. Stephen Brown learned through Facebook, not an official notice, that he was moved from Ward 1 to Ward 2. 

Stephen Brown, a resident of Briarwood Heights in northeast Jackson, ran into difficulty voting April 1.

A resident of the Briarwood Heights neighborhood in northeast Jackson, Brown’s efforts to vote Tuesday have been complicated by mixed messages and a lack of communication. He has yet to vote, even though he showed up at the polls at 7:10 this morning. 

His odyssey took him to two wrong locations, where the poll managers instructed Brown to call his ward’s election commissioner, who did not answer multiple calls, Brown said. Brown finally learned through a Facebook comment that he could look up his new precinct on the Mississippi Secretary of State’s website — if he scrolled down the page past his county precinct information.

This afternoon, Brown has a series of meetings planned, so now he’s hoping for a 30-minute window to try voting one more time, even though he’s skeptical it will make a difference. 

“I’m a very disenchanted voter, because I’ve been let down so much,” he said. “I vote because it’s the thing that I’m supposed to do and because of the sacrifices of my ancestors, but not because I truly believe in it, you know?” 

Brown’s not alone in facing turbulence. Back at Christ Tabernacle, one Jackson voter, who declined to give her name, said she’s frustrated from having to drive to three polling locations in one day.

“I’m dissatisfied with the fact that I had to drive from one end of this street and all of the back to come over here when I usually vote over here on Highway 18,” she said. “This was a great inconvenience, gas wise and time wise.”

The same thing happened to Rodney Miller. He called the confusion some voters are facing in this election “unnecessary.” 

“That ain’t the way we should be handling business,” he said. “We should be looking out for one another better than that, you know? It’s already enough getting people out to vote, and when you confuse them when they try? Come on now. That’s discouraging.”

Christ Tabernacle is the second largest precinct in the city in terms of registered voters, with 3,330 assigned to vote there as of 2024, according to documents retrieved from the municipal election committee. But it had one of the lowest voter turnout rates – 10% in the 2021 primary election before redistricting and before it became so large.

Byrd mentioned the much higher turnout in places like Ward 1 in northeast Jackson, compared to where he lives in south Jackson. Why does Byrd think this is?

“Civics,” Byrd said. “They took civics out of school. If you ask the average person what is the role and responsibility of any elected official, they can’t tell you.”

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

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