Mississippi Today
New legislative leadership: Nothing off table in tackling Mississippi health issues

Last year, committee chairs in the House and Senate killed every Medicaid expansion bill without a debate or vote.
Now, for the first time in a decade, a policy that has been politically forbidden in Mississippi will at least get a full hearing.
That’s because of pivotal changes in House leadership. Newly elected Speaker Jason White appointed Missy McGee, R-Hattiesburg, to chair the Medicaid Committee, and Sam Creekmore IV, R-New Albany, to chair the Public Health and Human Services Committee.
McGee has been a vocal proponent of postpartum coverage, which passed last year, and presumptive eligibility for pregnant women – which did not. Creekmore, along with Rep. Kevin Felsher, R-Biloxi, successfully passed legislation last year to improve mental health services in the state.
Both say that this year, nothing is off the table. And while leadership on the Senate side of Public Health and Medicaid remains the same, committee chairs there have voiced support of increasing health care coverage and reform.
“I do think it could definitely be a historic year for the state of Mississippi,” McGee said, “in that we have talked a lot about providing health care to low-income workers.”
McGee and Creekmore have also been diligent about reframing the narrative around expansion to make it clear that the increased coverage they support is not welfare and it’s not a handout – it’s health care coverage for low-income, working-class Mississippians.
“And we don’t really know what that’s going to look like right now,” McGee said, “but it has been something that the majority of Mississippians really support. I’m looking forward to coming up with sound policy that would provide this option for hardworking Mississippians who can’t afford health care – whether their employers don’t offer it, or whether they simply can’t afford to purchase it.”
McGee said she is also looking forward to reintroducing her presumptive eligibility bill – which would allow pregnant women to be presumed eligible for Medicaid and receive timely prenatal care. House Bill 539 was assigned to committee this week.
“We know that with a lot of women who are eligible for Medicaid, it often takes quite a while before they are able to get on their Medicaid benefits – and sometimes it can be beyond the first trimester,” she said.
McGee says she has confidence presumptive eligibility will pass this year, and will help move Mississippi off the top of the list for infant and maternal mortality – which she says is her goal for the term.
“I just feel like it’s got a lot more momentum this year than it has in years past,” she said.
Creekmore said he was surprised at his appointment to chair the Public Health Committee, and he did not ask for it – though it was his first choice.
Creekmore, who comes from a family of health care workers, said health care has always been “near and dear” to him. He remembers, growing up, the phone would sometimes ring in the middle of the night and he would wake up his father to attend a delivery.
“He’s a hometown doctor and he’s my hero,” Creekmore said about his father.
Last year, Creekmore authored House Bill 1222 – which provides mental health training for law enforcement and helps families dealing with the court systems. It passed unanimously.
“My first four years, for whatever reason, the Lord has led leadership to put me into the mental health realm, and we’ve made some great strides,” Creekmore said. “I want to continue to do that, and I just thought I would be more effective in Public Health.”
In the Senate, Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, is introducing a presumptive eligibility bill similar to McGee’s.
In addition to two presumptive eligibility bills coming from both the House and Senate, Blackwell said, “we’ll also probably have it added to the tech bill. It’s a serious issue for a lot of us on this side.”
The Medicaid technical bill is a notoriously complicated bill with a lot of jargon that outlines the function and scope of Medicaid, and which must be renewed every three years. This year, it’s up for renewal.
The tech bill could be a way to pass presumptive eligibility for pregnant women or Medicaid expansion – if separate bills on those fronts aren’t successfully passed. The tech bill usually bounces back and forth between the chambers, and involves concessions on both sides, since, unlike other bills, the tech bill must be renewed for the program to operate.
Aside from presumptive eligibility, Blackwell also filed Senate Bill 2080, on professional midwifery, and Senate Bill 2079 on nurse-practitioner collaboration agreements.
The midwifery bill would look at establishing a formal licensed midwifery program in the state – the first of its kind.
Midwifery is currently not regulated in Mississippi, meaning anyone can practice without formal training or certification. Midwives who want to undergo a certification program end up going out of state – and sometimes don’t return.
In a state riddled with maternity care deserts, losing providers to neighboring states because they are offering a service Mississippi could easily offer just doesn’t make sense, Blackwell explained.
Midwifery, he says, is an obvious solution for non-complicated, low-risk births, since “women have been helping women have babies since our primitive days.”
Senate Bill 2079 seeks to abolish restrictive collaboration agreements between nurse practitioners and physicians.
These agreements are expensive and limit the freedom with which nurse practitioners can operate. They usually have distance limitations, as well, placing restrictions on how far from their collaborating physicians nurse practitioners can practice. Since most physicians operate in urban areas, that means nurse practitioners can’t provide care to the rural communities that desperately need it.
“All it is is a paid relationship and it needs to go away,” Blackwell said. “Nurse practitioners aren’t killing folks, they’re not doing major surgeries, open heart surgeries. They’re practicing within the confines of their license and given our need to have access to health care, why would we not do this?”
Blackwell has filed similar bills in past years, but they all died in committee.
Like Blackwell in Medicaid, Hob Bryan, D-Amory – the longest-serving state senator – is continuing to chair Public Health.
Bryan said he is excited to be “on the horizon of a new four-year term,” although, he joked, he might not make it that long – a nod to the presentation State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney gave to the Senate Public Health Committee last Wednesday.
In it, Edney had stressed the urgency of several public health metrics and had said to Bryan “I don’t think I’m the oldest one in this room, no offense Mr. Chairman, the life expectancy is 71,” – the lowest in the country.
“These are real numbers that impact real Mississippians,” Edney said. “We have the highest rate of preventable deaths. That means more Mississippians die unnecessarily every year than anywhere else in this country, and these problems have solutions. I trust your good judgment to get us where we need to be. And I want to help you with whatever data, information, resource you need.”
While it’s unclear whether Republicans who say they will consider Medicaid expansion will ultimately support it, Bryan has been more outspoken with his beliefs that the current system of coverage is not working for low-income working Mississippians.
Diabetes, according to Bryan, is a “maddening example” of a group of people who are ineligible for preventative care, and become eligible for health care only by the time they need to have limbs amputated.
“At which point, congratulations!” Bryan exclaimed. “Now you are disabled and you qualify for health care.”
Edney gave presentations to both the House and Senate Public Health committees during their first meetings of the session. Rep. McGee says her committee will be hearing from Drew Snyder, Mississippi Medicaid executive director, next week.
The deadline to file bills is Feb. 19, later than most years since the first session of a new term is 120 days, as opposed to the typical 90 days.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Derrick Simmons: Monday’s Confederate Memorial Day recognition is awful for Mississippians
Editor’s note: This essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.
Each year, in a handful of states, public offices close, flags are lowered and official ceremonies commemorate “Confederate Memorial Day.”
Mississippi is among those handful of states that on Monday will celebrate the holiday intended to honor the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
But let me be clear: celebrating Confederate Memorial Day is not only racist but is bad policy, bad governance and a deep stain on the values we claim to uphold today.
First, there is no separating the Confederacy from the defense of slavery and white supremacy. The Confederacy was not about “states’ rights” in the abstract; it was about the right to own human beings. Confederate leaders themselves made that clear.
Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declared in his infamous “Cornerstone Speech” that the Confederacy was founded upon “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” No amount of revisionist history can erase the fact that the Confederacy’s cause was fundamentally rooted in preserving racial subjugation.
To honor that cause with a state holiday is to glorify a rebellion against the United States fought to defend the indefensible. It is an insult to every citizen who believes in equality and freedom, and it is a cruel slap in the face to Black Americans, whose ancestors endured the horrors of slavery and generations of systemic discrimination that followed.
Beyond its moral bankruptcy, Confederate Memorial Day is simply bad public policy. Holidays are public statements of our values. They are moments when a state, through official sanction, tells its citizens: “This is what we believe is worthy of honor.” Keeping Confederate Memorial Day on the calendar sends a message that a government once committed to denying basic human rights should be celebrated.
That message is not just outdated — it is dangerous. It nurtures the roots of racism, fuels division and legitimizes extremist ideologies that threaten our democracy today.
Moreover, there are real economic and administrative costs to shutting down government offices for this purpose. In a time when states face budget constraints, workforce shortages and urgent civic challenges, it is absurd to prioritize paid time off to commemorate a failed and racist insurrection. Our taxpayer dollars should be used to advance justice, education, infrastructure and economic development — not to prop up a lost cause of hate.
If we truly believe in moving forward together as one people, we must stop clinging to symbols that represent treason, brutality and white supremacy. There is a legislative record that supports this move in a veto-proof majority changing the state Confederate flag in 2020. Taking Confederate Memorial Day off our official state holiday calendar is another necessary step toward a more inclusive and just society.
Mississippi had the largest population of enslaved individuals in 1865 and today has the highest percentage of Black residents in the United States. We should not honor the Confederacy or Confederate Memorial Day. We should replace it.
Replacing a racist holiday with one that celebrates emancipation underscores the state’s rich African American history and promotes a more inclusive understanding of its past. It would also align the state’s observances with national efforts to commemorate the end of slavery and the ongoing pursuit of equality.
I will continue my legislative efforts to replace Confederate Memorial Day as a state holiday with Juneteenth, which commemorates the freedom for America’s enslaved people.
It’s time to end Confederate Memorial Day once and for all.
Derrick T. Simmons, D-Greensville, serves as the minority leader in the state Senate. He represents Bolivar, Coahoma and Washington counties in the Mississippi Senate.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The post Derrick Simmons: Monday's Confederate Memorial Day recognition is awful for Mississippians appeared first on mississippitoday.org
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Left-Leaning
This article argues against the celebration of Confederate Memorial Day, stating it glorifies a racist and failed rebellion that is harmful to societal values. It critiques the holiday as a symbol of white supremacy and advocates for replacing it with Juneteenth to honor emancipation. The language used, such as referring to the Confederate cause as “moral bankruptcy,” and the call to replace the holiday reflects a progressive stance on social justice and racial equality, common in left-leaning perspectives. Additionally, the writer urges action for inclusivity and justice, positioning the argument within modern liberal values.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois urged active resistance to racist policies
April 27, 1903

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