Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney told the Greenwood Voters League in October the Delta no longer had any political sway in Jackson.
“There’s not enough votes in the Delta to make anybody care,” Chaney said.
An entire region of the state has been reduced to its lack of voting power.
While Chaney’s statement looks on the surface to be a statement about numbers, it really isn’t.
What Chaney is saying is there aren’t enough of the right kind of voters.
Because, as we’ve seen time and time again, the right kind of voters in Mississippi are Republicans and the Delta skews to the other party.
It was evident when Tate Reeves took $500,000 away from Greenville for a reconstruction of the greenspace downtown.
He said it was for fiscal responsibility. It was for spite.
While in most cases the state government’s ire for a particular region may not be a life-and-death matter, we now are facing such.
Tim Kalich, the publisher and editor of The Greenwood Commonwealth, presented the dire state of health care in Mississippi to our Rotary Club on Thursday.
Greenwood’s hospital is on the verge of closing. State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney said there are six hospitals in the Delta in a similar situation.
Kalich said he called Edney's office to confirm the statement and while they would not divulge the names of the six hospitals, the number was accurate.
I can’t imagine a town the size of Greenwood without a hospital.
What’s worse? Imagine a town the size of Greenville without a hospital.
Kalich has carried the banner for Medicaid expansion for years and while it is not a panacea, it surely would serve to strengthen the financial stability of what is one the most important operations in a community.
Our Governor has stood firmly against the expansion of Medicaid. Why? He won’t say it exactly, but since it was a policy of a Democrat president, he’s going to be against it.
Reeves would probably say the Medicaid expansion is a gamble on what could be an enormous expense to the state.
While that could possibly be true, the state just handed what would be about the same dollar figure $250-$300 million to a private company to build a factory in Lowndes County to employ 1,000 people.
That’s good for Lowndes County, but who knows if the whims of the world will change and the factory will no longer be a viable concern in five years.
I doubt the world will change enough in five years to make a hospital obsolete.
The Delta would stand to benefit immensely from Medicaid expansion, but we don’t have enough of the right kind of votes to make that happen.
Kalich pointedly mentioned that hospitals could close all over the Delta and probably wouldn’t move the needle in Jackson, but what happens when a hospital closes in a Republican town?
While that might light a fire under the state capitol, it would be too late to remedy our situation.
Greenwood’s hospital may be already dead in the water.
Our hospital is struggling for its life.
While the loss of a hospital acutely affects the health and well-being of a community it also directly affects the economics of the same.
Hospitals are often among the largest employers in the area. The employees are among the most highly compensated in their towns.
It is often said two bellwethers of the death of a town are the loss of the hospital and the loss of the grocery.
Our groceries aren’t going anywhere today, but there are fewer of them now than 10 years ago.
Our hospital isn’t shutting its doors today, but it’s losing money at a rapid pace.
Our governor can sit in Jackson and watch an entire region of his state lose equitable access to healthcare, but it doesn’t have enough of the right kind of votes to make him care.
