Mississippi Today
New Biden administration rule would ban medical debt from credit reports

Originally published by The 19th
Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday announced a new effort to ban medical debt from credit reports, something that would ease a burden that falls most heavily on women and Black people.
“Medical debt makes it more difficult for millions of Americans to be approved for a car loan, a home loan or a small business loan, all of which in turn makes it more difficult to just get by, much less get ahead, and that is simply not fair. Especially when we know that people with medical debt are no less likely to repay a loan than those without medical debt,” Harris said. “No one should be denied access to economic opportunity simply because they experienced a medical emergency.”
Federal efforts to remove medical debt from credit reports began last fall after Harris announced that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) would take the first steps to create rules that would take medical bills off credit reports, prohibit creditors from using medical bills to make underwriting decisions and ban collectors from using medical debt to pressure consumers to make payments. These proposals would narrow the 2005 exemption in the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which allowed creditors to use medical debts in underwriting credit decisions. Creditors would still have the ability to access medical debts and bill information in certain instances, such as to evaluate loan applications for medical services.
Other federal efforts to curb medical debt include the No Surprises Act, which took effect in July 2022 and requires private health insurers to cover most emergency services, emergency care and non-emergency in-network services and prohibits medical providers from billing patients more than in-network cost sharing.
The rule change could lead to more people being able to borrow money, as CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said it would give lenders more accurate and predictive information about borrowers.
“The 15 million Americans who would benefit from this credit reporting change would see their scores rise by an average of 20 points. … For mortgages alone, we estimate that this could lead to approximately 22,000 additional home loans each year,” he said. “Our action today is an important step toward reducing some of the unnecessary costs of getting sick in America.”
According to a senior administration official, this rule would include historical medical bill information and dental debt.
Other federal efforts to curb medical debt include the No Surprises Act, which took effect in July 2022 and prohibits surprise billing for most emergency services and non-emergency services done out-of-network.
The nationwide credit reporting agencies, which are Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, removed medical debt under $500 from consumer credit reports as of April 2023. However, this April, the CFPB released research that found 15 million Americans still have medical debt on their credit reports — particularly those in the American South and low-income communities. A March 2022 report from the CFPB found that Americans were harboring $88 billion in medical debt.
A KFF Health Policy Research analysis published this year based on the 2021 national Survey of Income and Program Participation found that 20 million people owed a collective $220 billion in medical debt. The analysis found that 13 percent of people with disabilities reported having medical debt, compared with 6 percent of those without a disability. It also found that non-Hispanic Black people carry more medical debt than other racial and ethnic groups, and women carry more than men. A separate analysis found that 14 percent of people who gave birth within the last year and a half reported having medical debt, compared with 7 percent of those who did not.
“Since we know that Black adults and women are more at risk of having medical debt, then I would expect this policy would benefit those groups,” said Cynthia Cox, KFF vice president and director of the foundation’s Program on the Affordable Care Act, which examines health care coverage costs, affordability and accessibility.
Undue Medical Debt, the nonprofit formerly known as RIP Medical Debt that contacts hospitals and health care systems requesting that they sell or donate portions of patients’ debt, and Perry Undem, a nonpartisan public opinion research firm, surveyed over 2,600 adults in August 2023, 229 of whom were Black women. Among Black women, 27 percent said they have delayed or said no to health services out of concerns over acquiring medical debt. A study from the American Cancer Society published in March suggested that “medical debt is associated with worse health status, more premature deaths, and higher mortality rates at the county level in the US.”
In 2022, YouGov, a research data and analytics technology group, reported that 66 percent of Americans supported government relief for medical debt. Eva Stahl, the vice president of public policy and program management at Undue Medical Debt, attributes this support to the fact that it can impact anyone.
“It’s not a debt of choice, it’s a debt of necessity. Because there’s a general consensus about that, it’s not really a partisan issue,” she said.
Stahl said they have gotten interest from legislators across the nation, even in the South, with some jurisdictions in Texas and Kentucky showing interest in erasing residents’ medical debt. Some state-level efforts to erase medical debt for state residents have either passed or been proposed — some in partnership with Undue Medical Burden.
In June 2023, Colorado became the first state to prohibit medical debt from being included on residents’ credit reports. Similar legislation was passed this year in Connecticut and proposed in New Jersey.
Last year, Connecticut’s state legislature approved a budget that would allocate $6.5 million in American Rescue Plan (ARP) funding toward erasing medical debt for residents whose medical debt is 5 percent of their income or whose household income is up to 400 percent of the federal poverty line. Earlier this year, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, announced efforts to use $30 million of ARP funding to cancel medical debt for up to 1 million Arizonans, using similar criteria as Connecticut. Both states partnered with Undue Medical Debt
To Stahl, removing medical debt from credit reports has limitations.
“It’s an action that is helpful, but it’s not getting it’s not at the it’s not at the root,” which is “that people don’t have access to affordable high quality health care,” Stahl said. “Even if you banned medical debt from credit reports, which is an important and worthy exercise, people still have unpaid medical bills. … Patients will still feel the stress of having debt collectors call them several times a day, asking them when they’re going to pay their medical bills, or they may get into payment plans that they can’t really afford.”
A senior administration official said public comments are being accepted through August 12. They expect the rule to be finalized early next year.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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.
Mississippi Today
House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget
The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.
Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.
The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend.
House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session.
“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.”
But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.
The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.
The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass.
Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget.
“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said.
The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.
But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.
The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.
The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session.
But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget.
On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.
If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later.
“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said.
If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Amount of federal cuts to health agencies doubles
Cuts to public health and mental health funding in Mississippi have doubled – reaching approximately $238 million – since initial estimates last week, when cancellations to federal grants allocated for COVID-19 pandemic relief were first announced.
Slashed funding to the state’s health department will impact community health workers, planned improvements to the public health laboratory, the agency’s ability to provide COVID-19 vaccinations and preparedness efforts for emerging pathogens, like H5 bird flu.
The grant cancellations, which total $230 million, will not be catastrophic for the agency, State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney told members of the Mississippi House Democratic Caucus at the Capitol April 1.
But they will set back the agency, which is still working to recover after the COVID-19 pandemic decimated its workforce and exposed “serious deficiencies” in the agency’s data collection and management systems.
The cuts will have a more significant impact on the state’s economy and agency subgrantees, who carry out public health work on the ground with health department grants, he said.
“The agency is okay. But I’m very worried about all of our partners all over the state,” Edney told lawmakers.
The health department was forced to lay off 17 contract workers as a result of the grant cancellations, though Edney said he aims to rehire them under new contracts.
Other positions funded by health department grants are in jeopardy. Two community health workers at Back Bay Mission, a nonprofit that supports people living in poverty in Biloxi, were laid off as a result of the cuts, according to WLOX. It’s unclear how many more community health workers, who educate and help people access health care, have been impacted statewide.
The department was in the process of purchasing a comprehensive data management system before the cuts and has lost the ability to invest in the Mississippi Public Health Laboratory, he said. The laboratory performs environmental and clinical testing services that aid in the prevention and control of disease.
The agency has worked to reduce its dependence on federal funds, Edney said, which will help it weather the storm. Sixty-six percent of the department’s budget is federally funded.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pulled back $11.4 billion in funding to state health departments nationwide last week. The funding was originally allocated by Congress for testing and vaccination against the coronavirus as part of COVID-19 relief legislation, and to address health disparities in high-risk and underserved populations. An additional $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration was also terminated.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the Department of Health and Human Services Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement.
HHS did not respond to questions from Mississippi Today about the cuts in Mississippi.
Democratic attorneys general and governors in 23 states filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Tuesday, arguing that the sudden cancellation of the funding was unlawful and seeking injunctive relief to halt the cuts. Mississippi did not join the suit.
Mental health cuts
The Department of Mental Health received about $7.5 million in cuts to federal grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Over half of the cuts were to community mental health centers, and supported alcohol and drug treatment services for people who can not afford treatment, housing services for parenting and pregnant women and their children, and prevention services.
The cuts could result in reduced beds at community mental health centers, Phaedre Cole, the director of Life Help and President of Mississippi Association of Community Mental Health Centers, told lawmakers April 1.
Community mental health centers in Mississippi are already struggling to keep their doors open. Four centers in the state have closed since 2012, and a third have an imminent to high risk of closure, Cole told legislators at a hearing last December.
“We are facing a financial crisis that threatens our ability to maintain our mission,” she said Dec. 5.
Cuts to the department will also impact diversion coordinators, who are charged with reducing recidivism of people with serious mental illness to the state’s mental health hospital, a program for first-episode psychosis, youth mental health court funding, school-aged mental health programs and suicide response programs.
The Department of Mental Health hopes to reallocate existing funding from alcohol tax revenue and federal block grant funding to discontinued programs.
The agency posted a list of all the services that have received funding cuts. The State Department of Health plans to post such a list, said spokesperson Greg Flynn.
Health leaders have expressed fear that there could be more funding cuts coming.
“My concern is that this is the beginning and not the end,” said Edney.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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