Beware Mississippi-Style Health Reform

Let’s be blunt here — Mississippi has the worst health care system in the nation. This isn’t my opinion. It’s the conclusion of a nonpartisan study released last year by the Commonwealth Fund. The study rated states on access to medical care, quality of care, costs, and health outcomes, and Mississippi was dead last — sorry, um, last — at #51. Among other honors, Mississippians are more likely to die for lack of medical care than are the residents of any other state (plus the District of Columbia).

You would think these statistics would be a concern to the state’s governor, Haley Barbour. But Governor Barbour wants you to know that Mississippi’s health care problems have been solved!

According to the governor’s website, before Barbour became governor,

“There was a health care crisis in Mississippi and it was caused by lawsuit abuse. Frivolous lawsuits increased the cost of health care and caused doctors to leave the state and hospitals to lose insurance. Obstetric wards were closing and neurosurgeons had stopped performing emergency surgery.”

But the state passed what some call the most comprehensive tort reform legislation in the nation in 2004, so (the website says) everything is all better now. And in November 2009 an editorial in the Natchez Democrat said, in all seriousness,

“We hope the national health care debate will look to some of Mississippi’s reforms as models for what should become a nationwide effort.

“Perhaps the nation can learn from Mississippi’s mistakes — and how we fixed them.”

This was published a few weeks after the Commonwealth Fund study was released. I guess having the worst health care in the nation is not considered a “mistake.”

Like many conservatives, Haley Barbour is fixated on personal injury lawsuits as the Source of All Evil, and as far as he is concerned, now that the rate of medical malpractice suits in Mississippi has fallen by 90 nearly percent, there is no health care problem.

Mississippi’s tort reform affected all kinds of personal injury suits, not just malpractice. These include suits against employers who failed to protect workers from exposure to toxins like asbestos, which can cause the deadly lung cancer mesothelioma and other severe diseases. A constitutional challenge to part of the 2004 law is now being considered by the state Supreme Court, which will be the topic of another post.

As I write this, health care reform seems to be stalled in Congress, perhaps permanently. Recently President Obama spoke to a conference of House Republicans, who complained to him that he did not take their health care proposals seriously. And their primary proposal is federal tort reform. Hey; it worked in Mississippi, right?

The President told the Republicans that they have to provide ideas that are more than empty talking points. “I mean, there’s got to be a mechanism in these plans that I can go to an independent health care expert and say, is this something that will actually work, or is it boilerplate?” the President said.

Judging by Haley Barbour’s “success” in fixing health care in Mississippi, I doubt some conservatives realize there’s a difference between a solution that works and an empty talking point.

— Barbara O’Brien

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 9:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.