Doctors plead with Senate to ‘do right’ and expand Medicaid

Right now, Mississippi hospitals lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year in uncompensated care costs, or money spent treating uninsured patients. That directly impacts the financial health of hospitals, with one report putting almost half of Mississippi’s rural hospitals at risk of closure. “It’s a tremendous burden on the health system,” said Dr. Claude Brunson, an anesthesiologist and the association’s executive director. “The whole system depends on us being able to take care of people, and we fund that through people on insurance. And when you go out to the rural areas of our state, there are a lot of people with no insurance but they need care. And they could have insurance, and that would help stabilize those hospitals there, those practices there, so that we can keep them open. If we can keep the hospitals open, we can actually see those patients in their hometowns, in their communities, and that’ll give us the ability to improve the health of Mississippi.”