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
Role reversal: Horhn celebrates commanding primary while his expected runoff challenger Mayor Lumumba’s party sours
“Somebody died in here?” asked one of the guests at the glum election watch party.
On Tuesday night, under a dozen supporters of Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba sat silently with news reporters on the low couches at a downtown marketing office, watching the results of the Democratic primary that played over muted televisions and fanning themselves in the sweltering heat.
The incumbent had nearly lost the mayoral election outright, earning 17% of the vote compared to Sen. John Horhn’s 48% in the last unofficial count of the night. It was a stacked race of 12 candidates and turnout was low – just 23% of the city’s registered voters participated.
Seven blocks away at The Rookery event venue, Horhn’s watch party was livelier. Around 8:45 p.m., about 100 supporters whooped and cheered as Horhn, his family and his pastor, Bishop Ronnie Crudup Sr., walked into the shiny marbled room.
“That appears to me to almost be a mandate, for one candidate to secure that much percentage of the vote,” Horhn, the state senator of 32 years, said.
The 2025 Democratic primary for Jackson mayor shaped up to be somewhat of a rematch, with the roles reversed this time. After meeting defeat against Lumumba in the same race in 2017, Horhn nearly avoided a runoff in the unofficial count Tuesday, securing 12,318 of the total 25,665 votes. It is his fourth time running for mayor.
“We knew it was gonna be close and had turnout been a little higher, had we worked a little harder, we might’ve been able to get there.”
Unless he receives nearly all of the mail-in absentee and affidavit votes left to be counted, Horhn will face a runoff, likely with Lumumba, on April 22. Lumumba received 4,267 votes. Tim Henderson, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel known by few at the start of the race, finished close in third with 3,482 votes.
In a speech, Horhn thanked his father, Charlie, his family, members of the Legislative Black Caucus, and his campaign supporters, shouting out many by name, including well-known restaurateur Jeff Good, whose support of Horhn was seized on by some mayoral candidates as a reason to not vote for the state senator.
“You know, a lot has been said by some of my opponents about the fact that we were reaching out across different party lines, racial lines, socioeconomic lines, but everybody wants Jackson to do well,” he said. “And in time, Jackson will be well.”
Good’s support was one reason Horhn’s competitors in the primary tried to paint him as a Trojan Horse for white business interests in the city. He also received endorsements from sitting state representatives and the unions of public sector workers and Jackson firefighters.
“Anyone who thinks that John Horhn is bought by anyone obviously hasn’t seen the depth and breadth of the people that he’s worked for 40 years, and all the endorsements that he has received,” Good said. “The endorsements read like a who’s who of Black leadership. Those are facts. I mean, listen. This is a who’s who room. There’s former supervisors in here, there’s former state senators, current state senators, it’s amazing.”
The accusation is not grounded in a factual understanding of the Legislature, said Rep. Justis Gibbs, D-Jackson, who noted that Horhn is one of 52 senators in a statehouse led by Republicans, not Democrats.
And, Horhn’s district is larger than Jackson, so he has other cities to think about, like Edwards and Pocahontas.
“I think he has done well,” Gibbs said. “I know if I need something done … that I have an advocate, not an adversary.”
Good helped cater the watch party, with Broad Street sandwiches and Sal and Mookie’s pizza. He said he hoped Horhn could continue the vision of former mayor Harvey Johnson Jr. and finally bring a hotel to the downtown convention center, what many hoped would be the starting point of revitalizing the city.
“What was supposed to be the beginning was the end,” he said.
Last year, Lumumba was indicted on federal charges alleging he took bribes in the form of campaign donations from supposed developers of that same property in exchange for moving up a proposal deadline. He pleaded not guilty and his trial is scheduled for 2026.
“I am going to be clear that I am not guilty of any wrongdoing. I am not guilty of any wrongdoing,” Lumumba told reporters after the election results. “I admit that I love this city so much, and I am going to fight relentlessly in order to make sure that everybody gets the quality of life they deserve.”
Lumumba arrived at the Fahrenheit Creative Group office for his watch party, a location change from the luxury bed and breakfast where it was originally planned, a little after 9:30 p.m.. His wife Ebony and their two daughters accompanied him. He chalked up his low performance in the race to misinformation.
“When they tell Republicans to vote in the Democratic primary, we should not be standing here,” Lumumba said, dabbing at his brow. “They gave every reason for us not to be standing here, and yet we are standing here.”
One guest, Amina Scott, said she’s supporting Lumumba no matter what.
“He’s the only option for people in the city of Jackson as a progressive city that’s run by progressive American people,” Scott said.
She points to attempts by the state to take over Jackson Public Schools and the airport.
“It’s not a new concept that has happened in cities across this country where Black people run the cities and states to try to take them back, and they’re doing the same thing to Jackson,” she said.
“…We have to look at our history and understand it’s not a new thing and it’s an old game, and we need to win this time. And the only way we can do that is as a unit.”
Lumumba became mayor in 2017 after winning 55% of more than 34,000 total votes in the Democratic primary against eight challengers, including the incumbent, making a runoff unnecessary. Horhn, who was running for his third time that year, came in second to Lumumba with 21% of the vote. After his first term, Lumumba won reelection after receiving 69% of the vote in the Democratic primary in 2021 with under 20,000 Jacksonians turning out.
The 2025 election saw similarly low voter turnout of under 25,700 votes in the last tally of the night. Mail-in absentee ballots and affidavit ballots are still left to be counted. With all of the issues voters had identifying their correct precinct due to redistricting last year, an election official said they saw a higher number of affidavit ballots – those cast due to irregularities at the polls.
The 2025 election represented a drop in nearly 10,000 votes from 2017, but the city has lost more than that in population during that time.
If Horhn is victorious, his pastor Bishop Ronnie Crudup Sr. said he hopes Horhn can hit the ground running to reverse depopulation in Jackson, which has experienced some of the steepest losses in the country since the last census.
“We’re in a really tough and hurtful place in the city of Jackson right now,” he said. “Years ago, we experienced white flight in Jackson to the suburbs, and now we’re experiencing Black flight. People are feeling hopeless.”
Johnnie Patton, whose family owns the Big Apple Inn, a famous restaurant on downtown’s historic Farish Street, said she wants to see Jackson return to the city she knows it can be.
“We’ve lost a lot,” she said.
Across town at the Jackson Medical Mall, candidate Tim Henderson gathered with members of his family and volunteers around 7:30 p.m. while the election results trickled in.
Henderson, a military consultant who went from little name recognition to finishing third in the primary, said people liked him precisely because he was an outsider, having moved back to the city just two years ago.
“We keep electing the politicians that have been around, and we keep getting the same thing,” he said.
Inside the mall, also a voting location, the poll workers were packing up the precinct. In the center of the mall, empty tables and chairs waited for Henderson’s supporters who were steadily showing up for the watch party. Slow jazz music was playing.
Henderson set up his campaign headquarters here in an office he also uses for his consulting business. Since it was close to a precinct, he had to take down his office signage.
But the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel said he would stand outside the medical mall and talk to potential voters as they walked in, including one woman whose mother was killed in a shooting earlier this year.
“People are tired in this city,” he said.
That was reflected in the city’s anemic turnout, he added. At the medical mall, for instance, officials recorded just 115 official votes from the 541, as of 2024, registered there.
“When people have been in such a depressed and distressed state for so long psychologically it impacts them,” he said.
As he spoke to a reporter in his campaign office, someone called his desk phone. “Please, Mayor Henderson, give me a call back,” they said, but Henderson couldn’t answer it in time.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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.
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.
Mississippi Today
Feuding GOP lawmakers prepare to leave Jackson without a budget, let governor force them back
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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