A federal bill to provide health care for poor Mississippians was repealed

A budget reconciliation bill passed by Democrats in the U.S. Senate over the weekend and now awaiting a vote in the House does not provide relief to poor Mississippians trying to get health insurance.

Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C., praised the bill overall, saying, “However, the current bill does nothing to provide affordable coverage to the more than 2 million people with incomes below the poverty line.” The uninsured because their states refused to accept Medicaid expansion. The majority of people in the Medicaid coverage gap live in the South, and three out of five are people of color.

An earlier version of the bill, adopted last fall, offered a mechanism for people living below the federal poverty level (about $13,550 a year) to get health insurance. The proposal was designed to provide a health care option for the poor in 12 states, including Mississippi, that did not expand Medicaid. But at the time, the Senate Democratic leadership could not get the 50 votes needed to approve the so-called reconciliation bill. The $3.5 trillion bill by Democratic senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kirsten Sinema of Arizona was rejected on several grounds, not related to health care coverage.

Over the weekend, Sinema and Manchin signed on to the $669 billion reconciliation bill — known as the Deflation Act — to help deliver more goods.

• Various tax credits and other incentives for electric vehicles and other green energy technologies.
• 15% lower tax on large corporations.
• Insulin cap for Medicare recipients.
• A provision allowing Medicare to negotiate drug costs.
• Continued subsidies to help people buy private insurance on the health care marketplace exchanges.

A health care provision that was in an earlier version of the bill but was removed from last week’s proposal would have allowed people at the federal poverty level to get private health care coverage paid for by the federal government on health care exchanges.

Under current law, people with incomes below the federal poverty level are not eligible for Marketplace policies.

According to an analysis by Judith Solomon, a health policy analyst at Budget and Policy Priorities, two million Americans have access to health care coverage through the plan, most of them in Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. Republican politicians, primarily in the South, opposed Medicaid expansion.

In Mississippi, studies estimate that 200,000 to 300,000 primarily working Mississippians would be eligible for coverage if the state were to expand Medicaid.

If Mississippi were to expand Medicaid under current law, the federal government would pay 90% of health care costs with the state paying the rest. Gov. Tate Reeves, House Speaker Philip Gunn and others have argued that Mississippi can’t afford the costs of expanding Medicaid, even though several studies indicate that the expansion, including injecting billions of dollars in federal funds, would increase state revenue collections.