MERIDIAN, Miss. —
Politicians like to fix things...or promise they will. But, history doesn’t give them high scores for implementing real fixes.
Most things politicians want to fix – deep-rooted social, economic, and educational problems – can’t be readily fixed. Ron Heifetz, distinguished author of Leadership Without Easy Answers, calls these adaptive challenges – perplexing problems without easy answers.
He says adaptive challenges require asking hard questions, finding committed leaders and stakeholders, and getting people to adapt their beliefs, values, and/or behaviors in order to achieve solutions.
This challenging, frustrating process is unappealing in today’s quick fix society.
A timely example of an adaptive challenge facing Mississippi is health care for the working poor…not moochers, but hard working people who can’t afford health insurance. Remember, Republicans made getting people off welfare and into work a national priority. Without health care, though, working poor are more likely to turn back to welfare.
Against this as background, consider the following:
Mississippi has the highest poverty rate and the lowest per capita income in the nation.
Only about 50 percent of Mississippi’s workers are covered by employer health plans, down from 60 percent in 2000. Lower wage workers tend to be those without employer coverage.
Mississippi’s Medicaid program does not cover the working poor unless they have children...and, then, only minimally. Workers with children with income below 43 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible. For a family with one child the income limit is $4,836; with three children $8,160. For reference, one person working full-time at minimum wage earns $15,080.
This topic is timely because Obamacare is offering states additional funds to expand Medicaid. This would expand coverage to the working poor including those with children. Coverage would include those with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level…families with one child with income up to $13,579; with three children up to $22,836.
A just released study by IHL’s University Research Center says the Medicaid expansion would likely have an annual net cost to the state budget of $31 million by 2018 and $96 million by 2025.
Meanwhile, Mississippi hospitals bear the brunt of uninsured workers’ health costs. Uncompensated care totaling $525 million was provided by 116 Mississippi hospitals in 2011, $325 million unreimbursed by any federal or state program. In 2014 Obamacare begins reducing the limited reimbursements the state does get.
An unhealthy workforce is unproductive, unattractive to industry, and harmful to the state’s economy.
But, hospitals don’t want a heavier uncompensated care burden, many businesses don’t want to provide workers coverage, and Republicans don’t want to pay to expand Medicaid.
At least Republican Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney pursues a partial solution. His competitive insurance exchange should make coverage more affordable to businesses willing to offer it.
Any others willing to adapt to fix this challenge?
Opinion
Healthcare for working poor is challenge
- Opinion
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Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.” -
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist
Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.
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VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008. -
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists
When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”
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Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing. -
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered. -
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun
The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral. -
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.
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Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.
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Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist
Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley. - More Opinion Headlines
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