Government Healthcare Policy, Business and Technology

Medicaid blues: Hospitals, insurers wage political battle over managed-care dollars

Modern Healthcare: “That's all I have to say about that—I have to go bury the dead,” undertaker Stephen Holland said after listing his grievances with his state's Medicaid politics early one Friday morning in June. Holland is one of a handful of white Democrats left in Mississippi's House of Representatives, and he helped shape the past 20 years of Medicaid history when he chaired the panel with jurisdiction over the program. Reliving that history rattled him.

In conversation, Mississippi Deltans frequently link death and Medicaid. A 26-year-old barber in B.B. King's hometown of Indianola, who asked to be identified as Calvin Klein in case he gets tended to by a doctor who reads Modern Healthcare, sang his mantra: “If you ain't bleeding, you ain't dying, and if you ain't dying, you ain't trying to see the doctor.”

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