Mississippi Today
‘We have been struggling.’ As Mississippi’s health care crisis worsens, health department funding lags
State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney made one big ask of lawmakers this year: $9 million to hire the nurses needed to fully staff county health departments and a program that puts nurses in the homes of low-income pregnant women with high-risk pregnancies.
As he made the request, news headlines in Mississippi and around the country reported on the state’s financially struggling hospitals, worsening maternal mortality crisis and one of the highest uninsured populations in the country as the result of state leaders’ steadfast opposition to Medicaid expansion.
Still, the answer he got was no.
That’s not a novel response from lawmakers — the agency’s budget was slashed in 2017 and is still making up for the loss. But this year, it could be especially damning as the state’s health care crisis reaches a breaking point.
As hospitals bleed out and it becomes increasingly dangerous for Black Mississippians to give birth in the state, the need for public health services offered by the Mississippi Department of Health is seeing a resurgence.
“That was my testimony at the Legislature,” said Edney, the agency’s leader. “I reminded them … we are having to do more, which is not good. It’s a sign that the needle is moving the wrong way.”
But there’s a limit to what his agency can do without adequate funding.

The Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies program, a partnership between the department and the state Division of Medicaid, puts nurses in the homes of expecting mothers who are undergoing high-risk pregnancies. The program serves about 700 moms, Edney said.
He knows the number of moms involved in the program needs to grow. But to do that, he needs more nurses — an increasingly difficult resource to come by in Mississippi, where nurse vacancies and turnover rates are at their highest in a decade.
The $9 million would have paid for a total of 100 nurses, the bare minimum Edney said he needs to adequately cover the state’s public health needs.
The money needed to come from the state, Edney said, because federal funds have strict strings attached.
“One way I explained it at the Capitol was that state-funded nurses could do whatever we needed them to do,” Edney said. “I need Swiss Army knives. The feds give you the knife, and they tell you how to use it.”
But instead, as the agency’s responsibilities continue to grow, they got just enough to keep operating and cover inflationary costs for the next year — despite lawmakers starting the year with a historic $3.9 billion surplus.
Republican Rep. John Read, House Appropriations Chair and principal author of the Health Department’s appropriations bill, said the decision-making process was about prioritization.
“We had some money, but it’s like everything else: You don’t want to spend all your savings,” he said. “Everybody in this legislature wants to help everybody we can … Nobody gets 100% of what they asked for. There’s no way.”
Read maintained that the department’s staffing issue isn’t about their state appropriation — it’s about the nurse availability and desired salaries. To Read, hiring 100 nurses sounds impossible.
Still, Edney can’t hire even one of the 100 nurses without funding.
In an interview with Mississippi Today, Edney said he was grateful for the money his agency did get. He repeatedly expressed his desire to do the necessary work with what he got.
“We’ll keep trying,” Edney said. “That doesn’t mean we ignore those needs. We’ll push ahead with resources that we can find.”
The agency operates with a total budget of over half a billion dollars. The vast majority of that budget comes from federal dollars and a variety of fees generated from other agency operations. Less than 10% comes from the state.
Though the state portion is small, it is essential to the agency’s ability to fulfill its job.
It’s the mission of the state Health Department to promote and protect Mississippians’ health. That includes surveilling for diseases and sexually transmitted infections, as well as other preventative public health efforts. The agency is also responsible for overseeing water testing, inspecting restaurants and licensing and regulating health care facilities.
This year, the Legislature gave the state Health Department $48 million. Of that, about half will go to agency operations, which includes salaries for state-funded positions. The other half goes elsewhere — the state Department of Health acts as a conduit for millions that will fund programs within their agency and others.
While Edney was hoping to increase pay for his employees, he wasn’t able to secure enough funding to hand out uniform raises — just for the lowest compensated employees in the department.
The agency is experiencing a vacancy rate of over 40% across departments – meaning almost one of two jobs at the agency are not filled – according to Edney.
On paper, it looks like the agency got a huge increase in funding, up $13 million from last year. But $12 million of that money is set to go to the Victims of Crime Act program, which provides services for victims of domestic abuse, childhood violence and human trafficking. It’s a program that’s only recently been added to the state Health Department’s list of responsibilities, as well as the state’s new medical cannabis program.

The remaining $12 million of the state appropriation is split among systems such as trauma care, emergency medical services, AIDS-related services and drugs, stroke and heart attack care programs, domestic violence prevention, Mississippi qualified health centers, the early intervention program and Medicaid matching.
And in a last minute change toward the end of the legislative session, lawmakers also decided to task the department with choosing the state’s next burn center and awarding it $4 million. Merit Health Central in Jackson closed Mississippi’s only accredited burn center in October.
“I have to remind folks we’re happy to administer grants and direct funding from the Legislature,” Edney said. “But we had to keep our focus on what is our core appropriation. That appropriation that helps us achieve the things we have to achieve to make sure that the most vulnerable populations in the state are served to the best of our ability.”
For agency operations, the Health Department got an increase of about $720,000, which Edney said covered cost increases caused by inflation.
“So we didn’t go backwards,” Edney said.
In the newly painted lobby of Yazoo County’s renovated health department, Edney was candid about the state Health Department’s financial limitations.
“If I had the money, I would have done it yesterday,” he said of the county health department’s reopening on Monday.
It had been closed since September of last year.
“I have begged for the money to get our county health departments back open again,” Edney said. “We have been struggling.”
Within a month, David Caulfield, central regional administrator for the state Health Department, said the Yazoo clinic will be open four to five days a week, up from its temporary twice-a-week schedule, and be fully staffed.
It’s typically up to the individual counties to provide and pay for their county health department’s building, while the state pays to staff it.
“I want to personally thank the Board of Supervisors for caring about public health in Yazoo County,” Edney said. “Not every county has the same commitment to public health. They don’t look after their folks the same way you do it.
“I can’t tell you the joy in my heart to see this today because it shows me what we can do in Mississippi.”
But Yazoo County’s health department isn’t the standard — it’s an outlier.
As the state Health Department has been gutted by budget cuts over the past decade while simultaneously being tasked with more responsibilities, county health departments have suffered.

After the major budget cuts in 2017, hours were reduced at the majority of county health departments, and they became much harder to staff, Edney said. Services have been cut, too — county health departments stopped offering prenatal care in 2016.
And as hospital closures continue to loom — a report puts a third of rural hospitals at risk — it’s not apparent that the state Health Department is prepared to fill the gaps.
“We utilize all the resources we can from our federal partners to help the county health departments, but the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) does not fund public health at the county level,” Edney said. “It’s up to us to do that, and we just don’t have enough state funding to run 86 county health departments the way that we would love to run them.”
While county health departments remain a place where Mississippians can access vaccinations, STI testing, diabetes and hypertension care, tuberculosis screenings and treatment, pap smears, family planning and pregnancy testing, Edney wants to increase staffing and get health departments open longer more days a week. They’re also exploring restarting prenatal care at county health departments.
It’s not clear how he’ll pay for it, but Edney’s determined to try.
“I’m not negative, because we have to do a better job on our side of the street,” he said. “We will be doing all that we can do, so when I go back to the Legislature and continue to ask for funding our workforce needs on the county level, I can honestly say we’re doing all we can.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons 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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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.
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