The Goal of Health Care Reform
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour thinks the nation’s governors should have been invited to President Obama’s televised health care summit. “If the White House is truly interested in moving health care reform forward, they need to invite governors to the health care summit,” he said. “After seeing the bipartisan reaction from governors to the previous healthcare bills, it simply makes sense for the White House to seek input from governors before unveiling new legislation that could again be untenable to state governments.”
Gov. Barbour may want to ask Mississippians about what’s untenable. Mississippi has the worst health care in the nation. It is so bad, some residents are getting advice on public health programs from Iran.
Yet Mississippi’s governor wants to decide for everyone else what is and isn’t “tenable” regarding health care.
Gov. Barbour, who is chairman of the Republican Governors Association, is a go-to guy on many issues important to conservatives. Among these is “tort reform,” a critical issue for people with asbestos-related diseases like mesothelioma, who often need damage awards to care for themselves and their families.
According to the governor’s website, a “tort reform” act passed in 2004 solved most of the state’s health care problems by drastically reducing the rate of medical malpractice lawsuits filed in the state. However, Gov. Barbour is untroubled by the fact that Mississippians are more likely to die for lack of medical care than are the residents of any other state.
And what “tort reform” didn’t fix, according to Gov. Barbour, was taken care of by reducing the number of Mississippians receiving Medicaid. Now a group called the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program has acquired a grant of $800,000 from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to help enroll eligible children in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The Mississippi Health Advocacy Program estimates that 75,000 children in Mississippi are eligible for these services but are not signed up for them.
And why not? The Mississippi Health Advocacy Program says there are two reasons eligible children are not enrolled: One, Mississippi requires an annual face-to-face interview to maintain eligibility, which many people find burdensome and intimidating. Often people don’t know about the interview and learn they have been dropped from Medicaid only when they seek medical help. Second, the state does no Medicaid outreach whatsoever, and people who might want to enroll face a hurdle just trying to figure out how.
Mississippi’s not-user-friendly Medicaid policy has saved the state a great deal of money, Gov. Barbour says, and no doubt it has. And the Commonwealth Fund ranks Mississippi 49th of the 50 states and the District of Columbia in child health system performance.
As the nation debates health care reform, we might want to be sure we’re all talking about the same thing. Most of us, I think, want health care reformed so that more Americans can get medical care when they need it and at lower cost. Apparently some politicians think “health care reform” means something else entirely, although it’s hard to tell what that might be.
— Barbara O’Brien
