Mississippi Gov Tate Reeves Says If You Deadbeats Want Health Care, Get Yourself One Of State’s Many ‘High-Paying’ Jobs
Fleshbag governor still refuses to expand Medicaid.
Mississippi is currently the second worst state for health care, just nudging out West Virginia (go sit in the corner, West Virginia!). However, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves has a solution, which he shared last week at the Neshoba County Fair: Mississippians just need “better, more higher-paying jobs” that will provide excellent private health insurance — presumably, with a company car and stacks of $100s for easy cigar lighting — that is far better than some socialist Medicaid expansion.
That’s a brilliant plan that simply bursts with human empathy and a basic understanding of the world surrounding Reeves. The one drawback is that Mississippi is the poorest state in the nation with a poverty rate of 18.7 percent. If “better, more higher-paying jobs” were so readily achievable, Mississippi wouldn’t have such dismal outcomes in quality of life.
Reeves talks a big game about making health care more affordable and accessible, but as Heather Harrison at the Mississippi Free Press notes, he doesn’t “offer a concrete plan to make that happen.” Instead, he speaks in free market, rah-rah-rah generalities about how “we need to open up our health care system to more competition.”
Yet, he rejects the specific solution of Medicaid expansion, which would cover Mississippians who earn too much to qualify for traditional Medicaid but not enough to afford private coverage or benefit from federal subsidies. They are caught between a rock and a hard place without doctors.
The Republican-controlled Legislature axed a bill in 2022 that would have extended Medicaid benefits for new mothers — for the second year in a row, and state House Speaker Philip Gunn admitted that the primary rationale for their sociopathic behavior was that Republicans couldn’t look like they supported big government “Medicaid expansion.”
A couple weeks ago, an actual hospital CEO slammed Reeves for opposing Medicaid expansion. If a CEO has a greater appreciation for human life than you do, then Satan’s probably already getting your room ready in hell (no view, the AC is always busted).
Iris Stacker, the CEO of Delta Health System, said, “We don’t understand why Tate Reeves doesn’t understand why he needs a healthy workforce.” She explained that Medicaid expansion is good for business and ends up costing businesses less in states where expansion has drastically reduced the amount of uncompensated care costs. Louisiana expanded Medicaid in 2016, and rural hospitals saw a 55 percent decrease in uncompensated care costs.
Stacker supports Democrat Brandon Presley’s gubernatorial campaign. Presley also attended the Neshoba County Fair, and the two candidates traded insults, though everything Presley said about Reeves was actually true.
Presley pointed out that under Reeves’s watch, hospitals are closing and laying off workers across the state, and slammed Reeves for lacking “the guts or the spine to fix our hospital problems.”
“He’s fiddling while our hospitals are burning to the ground,” Presley said, “and he doesn’t care.”
Reeves claimed Presley is just hating on him because he “can’t talk about” his Democratic positions, even though that’s all Presley has done. Medicaid expansion is a widespread and mainstream Democratic policy. Hilariously, Reeves argued that the only reason Presley spends so much time talking about what a lousy job he’s doing as governor is that he can’t talk about the governor’s “fantastic record.” That’s true, after a fashion. It is literally impossible to discuss this.
“So he’s making up all these things that don’t make sense,” Reeves whined. No, Presley is unfortunately not making up the fact that Mississippians are poor and lack affordable health care.
Reeves won’t expand Medicaid, but he does have some expansive conspiracy theories, including the one about how Presley’s a puppet of the far Left.
“[Presley’s] a liberal Democrat in Mississippi, so he can’t talk about what he believes,” Reeves ranted. “So, of course, he going to make up things and make up these pseudo campaigns and events that are occurring that he has no control over and I can do nothing about.”
A quick reminder here that Mississippi is about 30 percent Black, and according to exit polls, 81 percent of white Mississippians voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and 94 percent of Black people voted for Biden. Reeves’s “othering” of liberals and Democrats isn’t simply ideological. There are overtly racial overtones.
Presley is white, but Reeves suggests that he takes his orders from “outsiders.” (The governor’s internal polling shows this is a cynical but sadly effective strategy.)
Regardless, poor people from all races and backgrounds will suffer because of Reeves’s policies. In that sense, he’s an equal opportunity threat.
Follow Stephen Robinson on Bluesky and Threads.
Subscribe to his YouTube channel for more fun content.
Catch SER on his podcast, The Play Typer Guy.
Taint Reeves (R)-Assnugget
Produce a movie which features a (fictional) southern state goverrnor who looks like that, acts like that, talks like that, and has a name like Tate Reeves - and southern politicians everywhere will accuse you loudly of promoting vile stereotypes that just ain't fair or realistic.