Haley Strikes Again!The plight of health care’s have-nots is vividly illustrated alongside a highway on the outskirts of Yazoo City, the hometown of Mississippi governor and potential Republican presidential candidate Haley Barbour.
But while many of the clinic’s patients stand to gain insurance and access to better health care under the national overhaul signed last year by President Obama, Barbour says Mississippi does not want the help. Instead, his calls to throw out the overhaul and the massive expansion of Medicaid at the core of the law are becoming the centerpiece of his emerging candidacy.
Barbour’s view: It’s costly big government at its worst.
His attacks baffle and infuriate health care advocates and physicians who work closely with the state’s most disadvantaged patients. They contend that Mississippi — the poorest state in the country, with the highest incidence of obesity — is among states most desperately in need of the broader coverage. They are especially dismayed because they view the law as a great financial deal for the state: The federal government will pick up 100 percent of the cost of the Medicaid expansion from 2014 to 2016 and 90 percent of the cost after 2020.
“It makes no sense at all. It is penny-wise, pound-foolish,’’ said Dr. Nate Brown, medical director of the Delta Health Center in Mound Bayou, a clinic for the poor and disadvantaged founded in the 1960s with backing from Tufts Medical School. Barbour, he said, appears to be out of touch with low-income people.
“They are not the people he rubs shoulders with on a daily basis, and they might not be people who voted for him,’’ said Brown. “But as governor he still is supposed to represent the entire population.’’...
...“There’s nobody in Mississippi who does not have access to health care,’’ Barbour said. “One of the great problems in the conversation is the misimpression that if you don’t have insurance, you don’t get health care.’’...
This is the part we knew was coming...“Most of the health disparities in Mississippi are not because of the inability to get access or afford health care,’’ said Barbour. “They are because of diet, alcohol, because of drugs, the very high incidence of illegitimacy that leads to high incidence of low-birth weight children.
