
Two bills that could serve as vehicles for Medicaid expansion this year passed their respective Senate and House Medicaid committees Wednesday.
These bills are referred to as “dummy bills,” meaning they have no details related directly to Medicaid expansion, but they bring forth the necessary code sections to do work on the policy later in the session while meeting legislative deadlines. They are authored by Medicaid Chairman Sen. Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, and Medicaid Chairwoman Rep. Missy McGee, R-Hattiesburg, respectively.
“There’s a lot of movement going on in Washington right now, not sure what these outcomes are going to be, so we’re going to bring forward this bill and again, this is basically a placeholder to see what happens down the road,” Blackwell said during the Senate committee meeting.
House and Senate leaders said earlier this month they are waiting until the Trump administration and a new head of federal Medicaid take office to discuss expanding Medicaid in Mississippi.
President Donald Trump selected TV personality and celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. His installment, which requires confirmation by the U.S. Senate, could take until late spring or summer.
Expanding Medicaid in Mississippi would provide health insurance to tens of thousands of low-income working Mississippians whose income is too much to qualify for Medicaid under the state’s strict eligibility requirements but too little to afford private insurance from the marketplace.
Last year, Senate leaders let their expansion “dummy bill” remain a skeleton up until the point when they killed it and then did a strike-all to the still-alive House bill, replacing it with their own language. All Medicaid expansion efforts died in the final days of the session when Democratic House leaders, who have been introducing expansion bills for a decade, opposed a plan they said would never go into effect and would be “expansion in name only.”
Last year’s dummy bill made it difficult for both chambers and parties to debate the policy itself. This year, with a federal administration in transition, it will likely be more delayed and difficult.
Mississippi is one of 10 states not to expand the federal-state program under the Affordable Care Act and accept billions in federal dollars.