Mississippi Rejects Medicaid Expansion and Embraces Innovation Instead

The Obama administration’s line is that the best way for states to expand health coverage to low-income populations AND save money is to accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.
 
Mississippi is taking a different approach—and the right one. It has rejected Obamacare’s 20^th century Medicaid-expansion model and is embracing 21^st century innovation as a way to provide more and better care at lower costs to low-income populations.
 
As the Pew Charitable Trust reports, diabetes is one of the most costly chronic medical conditions. It affects about 22 million Americans nationwide, and about 9 percent of Mississippi’s population, at a cost that equals about 3 percent of the state’s GDP.
 
When diabetes is well managed, the costs can drop significantly, so Mississippi has embarked on a project to use telemedicine to help its low-income population, which is disproportionately affected by diabetes.
 
Governor Phil Bryant worked with health care providers and tech experts to develop an 18-month project to reach out to those patients, especially in medically underserved areas, to help them manage their disease.
 
The project will begin in June, starting with 200 diabetics who live in the Mississippi Delta, one of the state’s poorest regions. They will be given a baseline exam and a computer tablet loaded with software so they can transmit their glucose levels, which will be monitored by a medical team.
 
The care is free for low-income patients, but the price tag for the project is $1.6 million. However, that price includes startup costs, which would drop significantly if the state were to expand the program later. For a little perspective, Oregon spent 187 times that figure to develop its Obamacare website, which has never enrolled one person.
 
If states can find a way to successfully manage their low-income diabetic populations, the potential savings would be huge. And they could take that model and expand it to other diseases.
 
If Mississippi is successful, we could see more states rejecting Obamacare’s costly effort to impose a failed industrial-era health care program, choosing instead 21^st century technology and innovation to improve health care and lower costs.