Virginia has seen the light, becoming the 33rd state to expand its Medicaid program to cover the working poor. When will Mississippi?
Virginia, like Mississippi, resisted for several years the federal government’s sweet deal to cover most of the costs of providing health insurance for those workers who made too much to qualify for traditional Medicaid and too little to be able to afford coverage on their own.
Virginia made the same argument that Mississippi has: namely, that the long-term costs to the state were unsustainable. And like Mississippi, its legislature has been controlled by Republicans.
But this year, Virginia — after hearing the steady beat of good economic news coming from states that expanded Medicaid — signed up.
It heard the report that these states were recovering faster and more robustly from the Great Recession than those that didn’t expand Medicaid. It heard what happened not just in liberal-leaning states, which embraced from the start this key element of the Affordable Care Act, but in Republican-dominated ones, too, that previously shunned anything associated with former President Barack Obama.
Such as Montana, where it’s estimated that since adopting Medicaid expansion in 2016, $350 million to $400 million of new money is circulating through its economy each year. Or in Louisiana, which also got on board in 2016 and found that in just the first year, the Medicaid expansion generated a $3.5 billion impact, produced $178 million in state and local taxes, and helped create or support 19,200 jobs.
Who in their right mind wouldn’t want a piece of that action, regardless of whose idea it was to create the expansion?
Even though Mississippi missed out on the most generous early years, when the federal government picked up 100 percent of the costs of coverage, it is still a very good deal at 90 percent. And, at least in the short term, the economic activity produced by the expansion should generate enough new tax revenue to pay for a state’s 10 percent share.
Medicaid expansion would be a winner for the state’s uninsured, for the state’s struggling hospitals and for the state’s overall economy. While Mississippi sits on the sidelines, other states — many just as politically conservative — are raking in the dough.
Maybe Mississippians should start a petition drive to put Medicaid expansion to a statewide referendum, as Utah will this November and Idaho and Nebraska could as well.
Or maybe Mississippi should break the GOP stranglehold in Jackson. Both Virginia and Louisiana have Democratic governors and Republican-majority legislatures. Their experience suggests that divided government gets more done than when one party has a monopoly.
