Kathleen O'Beirne hand-delivered an idea for a Medicaid expansion compromise to Sen. Kevin Blackwell as GOP leaders work to negotiate a deal.
A solution to the Republican impasse on Medicaid expansion by Adam Ganucheau, Mississippi Today April 27, 2024 Kathleen O’Beirne knocked loudly on Sen. Kevin Blackwell’s office door in the basement of the Mississippi State Capitol on Saturday morning. O’Beirne, a Ridgeland resident and mother of two boys, has been closely tracking the back-and-forth debate on Medicaid expansion, which Blackwell, as chairman of the Senate Medicaid Committee, is leading for the Senate.
Blackwell says Senate won’t budge on Medicaid work requirement Blackwell and some Republican senators have long maintained that any expansion deal must include a requirement that Medicaid recipients work, which is a conservative policy desire that the federal government has struck down in 13 previous expansion states. Including a stringent work requirement, health care advocates and legal scholars believe, would effectively kill any expansion plan.
The unlikely Mississippi politician who could tank Medicaid expansion However, an earlier House proposal also included a work requirement but would allow expansion to go into effect if the state could not convince the federal government to allow it. House leaders have not yet publicly responded to the Senate plan they received on Friday, but the work requirement piece has been the main topic of deliberations on that side of the building.
These Republicans wanted a Medicaid work requirement but couldn’t get approval. So they got creative.This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.Adam Ganucheau, as Mississippi Today's editor-in-chief, oversees the newsroom and works with the editorial team to fulfill our mission of producing high-quality journalism in the public interest. Adam has covered politics and state government for Mississippi Today since February 2016.
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