It’s good to hear Philip Gunn recognize that Mississippi’s rural hospitals are in a crisis and support helping them.
But the House speaker's idea — a onetime appropriation of $70 million — is not nearly enough.
The severe financial problems that Greenwood Leflore Hospital and others are facing can’t be fixed with a Band-Aid approach. It will take hundreds of millions of dollars more a year to put the state’s rural hospitals on solid financial footing. The way to produce that kind of revenue is to expand who is covered by Medicaid and to increase the reimbursements it and Medicare provide.
If a hospital is chronically stuck with providing care for which it is not paid or for which it is undercompensated, eventually it will go broke. A onetime bailout will only buy time.
Gunn is retiring from the Legislature in a year, so maybe he’s not all that worried about a long-term solution. Someone needs to be.
