Mississippi Today
The death of rural hospitals could leave Mississippians ‘sick, sick, sick’
The death of rural hospitals could leave Mississippians ‘sick, sick, sick’
GREENWOOD – Only a few dozen cars sit in Greenwood Leflore Hospital’s parking lot.
The hospital’s windows, streaked with purple paint, read, “Stay strong!” Another one says, “We love our patients!” Behind the glass, magazines sit untouched on side tables —the lobby is vacant.
Greenwood Leflore is the community’s only hospital, and it’s months away from closing.
The COVID-19 pandemic drained the hospital, which was already financially vulnerable, dry. Costs went up, while profit did not. Doctors and nurses, burned out from the pandemic, left in droves. Now, the hospital is shutting down floor after floor, cutting costs to maintain operations.
Mississippians know this story.
Dozens of hospitals across the state, many the only in their communities, are struggling to stay open.

A report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform puts a third of Mississippi’s rural hospitals at risk of closure, and half of those at risk of closure within the next few years. There are only three other states with worse prognoses.
But it’s especially devastating in Mississippi, where life expectancy and health outcomes are consistently the worst in the country.
Hospital administrators are holding their breath, waiting on help from the state, but they could be getting less money this year than they need. And there’s little to no chance that state leaders will expand Medicaid this year as 40 other states have done. Expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act would bring more than $1 billion in federal funding to Mississippi in a year.
Ryan Kelly, executive director of the Mississippi Rural Health Association, said the situation is dire, and there’s not a straightforward answer.
“I wish, for the sake of simplicity, I had one single thing I could point to and say this is the problem,” he said. “We have been saying this for a long time that this will get serious and it is now serious.
“We are in far more of a serious time now than we ever have been before.”
For the hospital CEOs, doctors and residents of rural Mississippi, this isn’t just a statistic. It’s a life-and-death reality.

‘Hospitals can close. Watch and see.’
Dr. John Lucas’s office is at the end of a quiet hallway, past empty rooms with empty beds.
Though he’s spent his entire professional life at Greenwood Leflore, Lucas, a longtime Greenwood resident and now chief of staff, remembers starting his career as a surgeon in a much different hospital than the one he sees today.
His late father, Dr. John Lucas Jr., practiced at Greenwood Leflore from 1963 until his retirement in 2011. Back in the hospital’s heyday, Lucas said his father’s patients overflowed into the hallways. At that time, the hospital was licensed for 250 beds, he said.
When Lucas joined his father at the hospital in 1988, he didn’t experience that level of activity, but it was a far cry from the desolate hospital he serves today.
“It wasn’t uncommon to have as close to 200 beds full when I first came here,” he said. “It’s really sad to walk these empty halls and to see that we only have one part of one floor occupied with patients.”
In the past decade, Lucas has watched the hospital close unit after unit, tapering services in an effort to stay open.
First it was the neurosurgery department. Then, it was the urology department and inpatient dialysis. Now, the hospital doesn’t have full coverage of its emergency room for orthopedics or general surgery. Most recently, it shuttered its labor and delivery department and intensive care units.
At a health affairs committee meeting in February, Nelson Weichold, chief financial officer at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, said the worst part about the looming hospital closures is the slow cessation of services.

“It’s not just when the hospital closes,” he said. “It’s the years building up to that when they’re taking financial measures to do everything they can to try and keep the doors open.”
But it’s not financially viable to keep all of those service lines open anymore, according to Greenwood Leflore’s interim CEO Gary Marchand.
About 75% of the hospital’s patients are uninsured or on Medicaid or Medicare, which underpay the hospital for its services, Marchand said.
So most of the time, that means the hospital is losing money caring for its patients. And for the quarter of patients who have commercial insurance, the hospital often has to fight with the company to get the claim paid, he said.
“Our challenge is we have to map the inadequacy of those payments to our cost structure,” Marchand said. “For years, systemically, they (Medicare, Medicaid and commercial insurance) have paid below real cost.”
Before 2020, the hospital was losing between $7 to $9 million a year, Marchand said. To satisfy the city and county, which partially own the hospital, Greenwood Leflore leaders came up with a plan to generate $7 million a year to break even.
Then COVID hit, and everything changed.
The hospital went into the pandemic with $20 million in cash reserves. With each wave of the virus, despite government relief, their reserves were depleted. By the end of 2021, half of the cash was gone.

It’s a fallacy that hospitals made money during the pandemic, Marchand said. Because Medicaid and Medicare paid for patients by their diagnosis, not the length of their hospital stay, patients who were in the ICU for weeks ended up costing the hospital.
Greenwood Leflore hasn’t been able to make the money back — it’s not clear why, but fewer people are seeking care, and payments have remained stagnant.
For several months, the University of Mississippi Medical Center was entertaining a plan to lease the hospital, saving it from closure. However, in November, the deal abruptly fell through without explanation from UMMC.
Marchand said the hospital has six months to figure out a plan or it’ll be forced to close.
“The struggle is to get the community and the legislators and others to understand a hospital is a business,” he said. “I think a lot of people think, ‘Oh, you need hospitals. They’re never going to go away.’
“Hospitals can close. Watch and see.”
A quick scroll on the hospital’s Facebook page shows that Greenwood residents know that closure is a real possibility.
Lucas said he hears the same refrain over and over again when he’s out in the community: “How’s the hospital doing?”
“Whenever I go to a social outing, it’s the first thing I get asked,” Lucas said. “Everybody’s concerned.”
Pie Fincher and her family are products of Greenwood Leflore Hospital.
Fincher, who is 89 years old, has only gone to another hospital for treatment one time in her life. Both of Fincher’s children were born at Greenwood Leflore, and the hospital has saved her life several times, she said, including once when she had a major brain bleed.
“It’s just been a lifeline for our family,” Fincher said.
But the neurology department doesn’t exist anymore. Neither does labor and delivery. Those doctors that delivered her kids and saved her life are long gone.
“I vividly remember how proud we were of that hospital to be built (in its current location in 1952),” Fincher said. “It was just state of the art everything. As time has gone on, we’ve been so fortunate to have so many wonderful doctors.

“That’s what’s so heartbreaking about it, is we have all these wonderful doctors that are willing to work in Greenwood — this little small, nondescript, tiny town — and we let them go.”
DeWitt Kimble was born in Greenwood 72 years ago. In the past few years, because of problems with his prostate, he’s increasingly relied on the hospital for emergency care.
Kimble first heard the hospital might shutter about a decade ago. Now that its closure is imminent, he’s worried.
“If you really close this hospital down, we’re going to have to go to Jackson,” he said. “We’re going to have to go to Grenada. We’re going to have to go to Cleveland, and a lot of people don’t have transportation, like me.”
The motor gave out on Kimble’s Suburban about a month ago, and he’s not been able to afford its repair.
If the hospital closes, residents such as Kimble will be forced to travel a half hour or more for care. In the Delta, where much of the population struggles with reliable transportation, the lack of a nearby hospital could be fatal.
Between a quarter and a third of Lucas’ surgeries are canceled, largely because of transportation issues, he said.
Kimble had a surgery scheduled on Monday to remove his catheter. His primary care physician at a private practice said he’d arrange for Kimble’s transportation, but Kimble said he’s called the office repeatedly, and no one has answered.
No one from his doctor’s office could be reached for comment by press time.
Kimble never made it to his procedure.
“I’m just sitting here, so frustrated,” he told Mississippi Today on Monday afternoon.
That means Kimble will still have to rely on his doctor in Greenwood and the hospital for continuing care.
“If the hospital closes, there will be a lot of walking dead,” he said. “Folks will be sick, sick, sick.”
Marchand’s Plan A is getting Greenwood Leflore designated as a critical access hospital. That means the hospital would have to give up almost all of its 200 beds, but it would get more money for services that it provides. Critical access hospitals are typically reimbursed by Medicare at a rate of 101%, theoretically allowing a 1% profit.
State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney said closing service lines and applying for different hospital designations are solutions he’s seen increasingly across the state, but especially in the Delta. Though they might keep hospitals open, it’s still a loss for the community, he said.
“You take what was a vibrant hospital in the Delta, pre-pandemic, and now it’s a shell of its former self, post-pandemic,” Edney said. “Their only road to survivability is to downgrade.”
But to qualify for the designation, Greenwood Leflore would have to be 35 miles from the nearest hospital.
They’re just short —South Sunflower County Hospital in Indianola is 28 miles away.
Marchand is hoping for a waiver from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare regarding the distance requirement. His argument is that because of transportation challenges for the hospital’s population, the hospital should be an exception.
If that doesn’t work, the hospital will go up for sale again.

The survival of Delta’s largest health care system will be ‘touch and go’ after this year
If you ask Iris Stacker, interim CEO of Delta Health System in Greenville, how long the hospital system has before it’s forced to close, perplexingly, she smiles.
“I intend to be here forever,” Stacker says.
But Chief Nursing Officer Amy Walker raises an eyebrow.
“We’ll be here through the end of the year,” Walker deadpans. “It’s really touch and go after that.”
The duo head up the largest health care system in the Mississippi Delta. And together, they’re trying to keep it from closing.
Walker’s cynicism is often balanced out by Stacker’s cheeriness, but they do agree on one thing: The hospital is losing money.
“Even Positive Polly over there can’t deny that,” Walker said.
Despite being licensed for over 300 beds, the hospital’s census hovers around 80 patients. And most of the patients are uninsured or on Medicaid or Medicare.
Last year, Delta Health spent about $26 million on uncompensated care. That amounts to about 15% of its total operating expenses.
“We don’t turn people away,” Stacker said. “Instead of trying to go to a doctor and pay for that visit, they wait until 5 p.m. and come to our emergency room.”
But the decline in hospital patients isn’t because care isn’t needed in the Delta, which has some of the worst health disparities in Mississippi.
“It’s not because the patients aren’t here,” Walker said. “It’s because we don’t have the nurses to take care of them.”
Walker said the hospital has long struggled to recruit nurses to Mississippi, much less the Delta.
“We’ve always had that problem,” Walker said. “And if you look at our salaries, we usually have to pay more than Memphis and Jackson to get nurses here. We were already used to doing that.”
The problem worsened during the pandemic, as nurses were offered more money to travel or work elsewhere. Others got so burned out that they went ahead and retired. Statewide, nurse vacancies and turnover rates are at a 10-year high.
Since the pandemic, the hospital’s nurse workforce has nearly halved.
The exodus’ effects have rippled throughout the hospital: emergency wait time has quadrupled, the largest medical surgery unit is closed, and half of the hospital’s ICU beds are not in use.

“You would think that now three years out, things would have normalized, but they haven’t, and I don’t think we’re ever going to get back to normal,” Walker said. “We’ve lost so much of our volume at this point. I can’t really predict if it will come back.”
During the pandemic, supply and labor costs shot up. While prices aren’t as high as they were then, they haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels.
The way Walker explains it, if the price of eggs goes up, a grocery store can make up for the inflation by passing the cost down to the consumer. But that can’t happen in a hospital setting.
Delta Health has to keep serving its patients, no matter if it’s losing money or not.
“We’re pretty much living on grant money right now,” Stacker said.
Stacker knows that Medicaid expansion is unlikely to pass this legislative session, though it’s what she thinks would help the most.
Without systemic changes, Stacker admits that the hospital’s fate is uncertain.
And if the Delta loses the hospital system, it’s going to affect the entire region.
“We save people’s lives every day here,” Walker said. “Once hospitals start closing, those patients aren’t just going to go away.”
Staying afloat, for now
Winston Medical Center’s CEO Paul Black is a numbers guy.
Black’s hesitant to say it, but he admits that his background has helped keep the hospital afloat.
Before taking the helm of the hospital, Black did consulting work for hospitals around the state and made use of his accounting degree as an auditor for the Medicare program.
“This reimbursement stuff is what I grew up doing,” he said. “So when I got started, I had already been on that side of the fence.”
Something his financial background did not prepare him for, though, was a disaster in his first week of work in April 2014.
Six days into his tenure, Louisville was hit by a devastating EF-4 tornado.
“I don’t remember a whole lot about what took place the first six months,” Black said. “I won’t say that I walked around in a fog, but there was just so much going on. And there’s no manual for it.”
During that time, funding was coming from various sources — disaster relief, cash reserves, community loans —which is why, years later, Black said the hospital’s finances don’t look as dire as many other hospitals in the state.
Winston lost money caring for patients during the pandemic, and Black said expenses have gone up while payments have not increased. The nursing home’s population has also been depleted because so many elderly Winston County residents died during the pandemic.
However, Black fought back with changes of his own.
The hospital raised nurse salaries, which convinced many to stay. Additionally, he’s made sure the hospital offers a diverse array of services —from a nursing home to mental health needs — to protect them from financial collapse.
“That keeps a lot of people coming here,” he said. “We’ve been very efficient with what we’re doing.”
But he warned that Winston Medical Center, while not in the red, isn’t in the green either.

Black’s predecessor, Lee McCall, now heads up Neshoba County General Hospital in Philadelphia, less than an hour from Louisville.
Neshoba County was similarly impacted by COVID —McCall said hospitalizations are down by about half, in part because many of the hospital’s chronically ill and elderly patients who regularly sought care or were in the nursing home died during the pandemic.
When McCall took the CEO job in 2014, the hospital averaged 1,500 annual admissions. Last year, they had 750.
Because of the drop in census, the hospital closed one of its acute floor wings in October to cut costs.
Additionally, more people are visiting the emergency room, where they know the hospital will provide care, whether or not they’re insured.

“Our ER visits have definitely gone up,” said Dr. Jon Boyles, the hospital’s emergency department director. “We’re seeing it seems more and more people who basically use the ER as a clinic.”
The hospital also lost staff during the pandemic — staff they can’t afford to hire back. McCall said he’s trying to do everything he can to prevent layoffs.
“To be honest, there’s just not anywhere to really lay off unless we just shut down a service line completely, which we’re trying to avoid at all costs,” he said.
McCall has kept a close eye on the Capitol the past few months. Like Stacker in Greenville, McCall knows Medicaid expansion isn’t going to happen this session, but he’ll keep advocating for it.
He doesn’t deny that hospitals need the grant money making its way through the Legislature, but said hospitals need a sustainable solution — not a temporary one.
“That’s one-time money,” McCall said. “That doesn’t fix the ongoing problem. So we’re going to be right back where we are now 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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