Mississippi Today
‘Very problematic’: Medicaid drops another 22,000 Mississippians, mostly for paperwork issues

The Mississippi Division of Medicaid removed another 22,000 Mississippians from its rolls in July in the second wave of disenrollments after the end of pandemic-era protections.
That brings the agency up to 51,967 disenrollments total during the unwinding process, with those numbers set to increase.
Beginning in March 2020, federal law prohibited state divisions of Medicaid from removing people from their rolls due to the COVID-19 public health emergency.
The emergency ended in May, and now agencies are reviewing the eligibility of their beneficiaries for the first time in more than three years.
According to one expert, Mississippi’s total number of disenrollments is not the most concerning statistic: It’s the fact that 80% of the people dropped so far have been disenrolled because of issues with their paperwork, which could mean many of them were still eligible.
“It’s very high,” said Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. “Yeah, that’s very problematic.”
Many of the people who have been procedurally disenrolled could be children. Kids in low-income families make up more than half of Mississippi’s overall Medicaid beneficiaries.
According to Mississippi Medicaid’s enrollment reports, 18,710 children have lost Medicaid coverage from June of this year to July. It’s unclear how many children have been dropped since — the agency has not yet updated its August numbers.
Mississippi is one of only three states that does not have Medicaid online accounts as of January 2023, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, though people do have the option to complete their renewal online.
According to a July press release, Mississippi Medicaid enrollment increased by 187,894 people, or 26%, from March 2020 to June 2023, bringing Mississippi’s Medicaid rolls over 900,000 people for the first time in the agency’s history.
In June, Mississippi Medicaid was set to examine the records of 67,695 Mississippians whose coverage was up for review.
It found that a little under half of those, or 29,460, were no longer eligible. According to the agency, about 60% of the people who were removed had remained insured during the pandemic because of the extended eligibility rules.
The latest data release shows that of the 75,110 Mississippians who had their eligibility evaluated in July, 22,507, or 30%, were unenrolled.
The majority of those were terminated because of “procedural reasons,” meaning they lost coverage for not returning paperwork or related reasons.
That means many of the people dropped so far could be people who are still eligible.
Alker said Mississippi’s ex-parte rate was “relatively low” — ex-parte renewals are automatic renewals, and the best case scenario during unwinding. Mississippi Medicaid spokesman Matt Westerfield said that the agency is focused on increasing those ex-parte approval rates.
“If individuals qualify for Medicaid coverage, we’d rather make that determination without having to mail a form that they have to fill out and that a Medicaid specialist then has to process,” he said.
Combined with the high rate of procedural terminations — only 11 states have higher percentages, according to Alker’s organization — it’s cause for concern, she said, enough that she suggested Gov. Tate Reeves should step in.
“The governor should absolutely pause these procedural terminations and figure out what’s going on,” Alker said.
According to Westerfield, the Division requested permission from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Aug. 7 for “four additional flexibilities that could help reduce procedural disenrollments while increasing ex-parte renewals.”
A letter provided to Mississippi Today by the Division shows that those “flexibilities” included permitting managed care plans to help beneficiaries submit renewal forms, renewing coverage for people whose information “is not returned or is not returned within a reasonable amount of time” and reinstating eligibility for people who were previously unenrolled more quickly. These allowances have not yet been approved, but Westerfield said the agency anticipates that soon.
People who were dropped because they didn’t submit the needed information can be reconsidered without a new application if they submit that information within 120 days of the disenrollment.
Though Mississippi Medicaid launched the “Stay Covered” outreach campaign that included postcard mailing, flyers and text and email blasts to make people aware of the unwinding process, the leader of a local health advocacy organization that has partnered with the agency previously told Mississippi Today that he doesn’t believe Mississippi Medicaid is doing enough to inform beneficiaries. Additionally, it’s not clear how many emails or letters have been disseminated — Westerfield previously did not respond to that question.
Westerfield did say the Division did not process renewals for a few months for beneficiaries in the Delta affected by tornadoes this spring, though it’s not clear if the agency is doing anything in particular to reach those people — who may be displaced — now.
The new data also reveals a growing backlog in Mississippi.
In June, about 5,000 renewals that were up for review were not completed. The new numbers show that an additional 15,000 reviews went uncompleted last month. Westerfield blamed it on the larger review group in the July reporting period compared to June.
Alker says the backlog isn’t uncommon, and it’s neither good nor bad news.
“We want states to take their time, and they still have a lot of time,” she said. States have until May 2024 to complete the unwinding process.
“But it speaks to the backlog and the system, and the fact that they don’t have enough staff to begin with in many states, including Mississippi,” Alker said. “The backlog will keep getting bigger, and that’s going to be a problem.”
And as unwinding continues and a mounting number of Mississippians are potentially without health care coverage, stress continues to mount on Mississippi’s health care infrastructure.
As Reeves and other Republican state leaders continue to oppose expanding Medicaid to the working poor, one report puts almost half of the state’s rural hospitals at risk of closure, and data from Alker’s organization shows that rural populations will be the ones most affected by unwinding.
“If there’s a big unwinding problem, it’s going to be really devastating for these rural communities,” she said.
CMS sent letters to all state Medicaid division directors last week, including Mississippi’s director Drew Snyder. Because Mississippi started disenrollments in June, CMS did not have comments about Mississippi’s procedural termination rate — they analyzed states’ May numbers in their letters.
However, the letter indicated they would continue to keep an eye on deficiencies in individual states’ unwinding processes.
“I think what was important about the letters is that CMS, this is the first time that they’ve done something publicly like this,” Alker said. “I took it as a sign that they’re stepping up their enforcement.”
As of August, almost 5 million people have been disenrolled from Medicaid nationwide, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The organization says up to 24 million people could end up losing coverage during the unwinding.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
A win for press freedom: Judge dismisses Gov. Phil Bryant’s lawsuit against Mississippi Today
Madison County Circuit Court Judge Bradley Mills dismissed former Gov. Phil Bryant’s defamation lawsuit against Mississippi Today on Friday, ending a nearly two-year case that became a beacon in the fight for American press freedom.
For the past 22 months, we’ve vigorously defended our Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting and our characterizations of Bryant’s role in the Mississippi welfare scandal. We are grateful today that the court, after careful deliberation, dismissed the case.
The reporting speaks for itself. The truth speaks for itself.
This judgment is so much more than vindication for Mississippi Today — it’s a monumental victory for every single Mississippian. Journalism is a public good that all of us deserve and need. Too seldom does our state’s power structure offer taxpayers true government accountability, and Mississippians routinely learn about the actions of their public officials only because of journalism like ours. This reality is precisely why we launched our newsroom nine years ago, and it’s why we devoted so much energy and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending ourselves against this lawsuit. It was an existential threat to our organization that took time and resources away from our primary responsibilities — which is often the goal of these kinds of legal actions. But our fight was never just about us; it was about preserving the public’s sacred, constitutional right to critical information that journalists provide, just as our nation’s Founding Fathers intended.
Mississippi Today remains as committed as ever to deep investigative journalism and working to provide government accountability. We will never be afraid to reveal the actions of powerful leaders, even in the face of intimidation or the threat of litigation. And we will always stand up for Mississippians who deserve to know the truth, and our journalists will continue working to catalyze justice for people in this state who are otherwise cheated, overlooked, or ignored.
We appreciate your support, and we are honored to serve you with the high quality, public service journalism you’ve come to expect from Mississippi Today.
READ MORE: Judge Bradley Mills’ order dismissing the case
READ MORE: Mississippi Today’s brief in support of motion to dismiss
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
Meet Willye B. White: A Mississippian we should all celebrate
In an interview years and years ago, the late Willye B. White told me in her warm, soothing Delta voice, “A dream without a plan is just a wish. As a young girl, I had a plan.”
She most definitely did have a plan. And she executed said plan, as we shall see.
And I know what many readers are thinking: “Who the heck was Willye B. White?” That, or: “Willye B. White, where have I heard that name before?”
Well, you might have driven an eight-mile, flat-as-a-pancake stretch of U.S. 49E, between Sidon and Greenwood, and seen the marker that says: “Willye B. White Memorial Highway.” Or you might have visited the Olympic Room at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and seen where White was a five-time participant and two-time medalist in the Summer Olympics as a jumper and a sprinter.
If you don’t know who Willye B. White was, you should. Every Mississippian should. So pour yourself a cup of coffee or a glass of iced tea, follow along and prepare to be inspired.
Willye B. White was born on the last day of 1939 in Money, near Greenwood, and was raised by grandparents. As a child, she picked cotton to help feed her family. When she wasn’t picking cotton, she was running, really fast, and jumping, really high and really long distances.
She began competing in high school track and field meets at the age of 10. At age 11, she scored enough points in a high school meet to win the competition all by herself. At age 16, in 1956, she competed in the Summer Olympics at Melbourne, Australia.
Her plan then was simple. The Olympics, on the other side of the world, would take place in November. “I didn’t know much about the Olympics, but I knew that if I made the team and I went to the Olympics, I wouldn’t have to pick cotton that year. I was all for that.”
Just imagine. You are 16 years old, a high school sophomore, a poor Black girl. You are from Money, Mississippi, and you walk into the stadium at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds to compete before a crowd of more than 100,000 strangers nearly 10,000 miles from your home.
She competed in the long jump. She won the silver medal to become the first-ever American to win a medal in that event. And then she came home to segregated Mississippi, to little or no fanfare. This was the year after Emmett Till, a year younger than White, was brutally murdered just a short distance from where she lived.
“I used to sit in those cotton fields and watch the trains go by,” she once told an interviewer. “I knew they were going to some place different, some place into the hills and out of those cotton fields.”
Her grandfather had fought in France in World War I. “He told me about all the places he saw,” White said. “I always wanted to travel and see the places he talked about.”
Travel, she did. In the late 1950s there were two colleges that offered scholarships to young, Black female track and field athletes. One was Tuskegee in Alabama, the other was Tennessee State in Nashville. White chose Tennessee State, she said, “because it was the farthest away from those cotton fields.”
She was getting started on a track and field career that would take her, by her own count, to 150 different countries across the globe. She was the best female long jumper in the U.S. for two decades. She competed in Olympics in Melbourne, Rome, Tokyo, Mexico City and Munich. She would compete on more than 30 U.S. teams in international events. In 1999, Sports Illustrated named her one of the top 100 female athletes of the 20th century.
Chicago became White’s home for most of adulthood. This was long before Olympic athletes were rich, making millions in endorsements and appearance fees. She needed a job, so she became a nurse. Later on, she became an public health administrator as well as a coach. She created the Willye B. White Foundation to help needy children with health and after school care.
In 1982, at age 42, she returned to Mississippi to be inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and was welcomed back to a reception at the Governor’s Mansion by Gov. William Winter, who introduced her during induction ceremonies. Twenty-six years after she won the silver medal at Melbourne, she called being hosted and celebrated by the governor of her home state “the zenith of her career.”
Willye B. White died of pancreatic cancer in a Chicago hospital in 2007. While working on an obituary/column about her, I talked to the late, great Ralph Boston, the three-time Olympic long jump medalist from Laurel. They were Tennessee State and U.S. Olympic teammates. They shared a healthy respect from one another, and Boston clearly enjoyed talking about White.
At one point, Ralph asked me, “Did you know Willye B. had an even more famous high school classmate.”
No, I said, I did not.
“Ever heard of Morgan Freeman?” Ralph said, laughing.
Of course.
“I was with Morgan one time and I asked him if he ever ran track,” Ralph said, already chuckling about what would come next.
“Morgan said he did not run track in high school because he knew if he ran, he’d have to run against Willye B. White, and Morgan said he didn’t want to lose to a girl.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session
Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting.
Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.
The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID.
The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots.
The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion.
Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor.
England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking.
The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber.
England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.
“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said.
Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting.
To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice.
Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures.
Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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