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“Bought sense is better than borrowed sense” lives in my memory, rent-free. I’ve always cringed at it because, at every stage of life, some lessons have been costly to learn.

At the Alluvial Collective, we show up to the office, on the screen, or in a community with one overarching challenge: to create or deepen the connections that will support collective thriving.  That is our “For what.”  We get to show up with wisdom purchased over our organization’s last 25 years of work and with wisdom borrowed from many generations and traditions.  In most traditions, self-reflection and stories reveal the path to where we should go and how we should travel.

As you engage in the National Week of Conversation, here are a couple of stories and a few thoughts to help you show up for each other, our communities, and our country.

What Do You Need

The first story emerges from a book called “Getting To Yes,” about negotiating.

Two people were arguing over an orange, and after some time, they decided to split it in half, feeling that equal parts were fair, like in elementary school. Before splitting the orange, they never asked each other the reason the other wanted it. As it turns out, one wanted the orange peel to flavor a cake, and the other wanted the orange’s “meat” to eat.

In another story, an arriving house guest is deeply offended by their host’s demand that they remove their shoes upon entering their family home. The visit goes off the rails and probably off the porch, too.

Each of these stories reminds you of tensions and dilemmas that are all too familiar in our families, towns, and – for me – our leadership discourse.  We have notions about what the other person, or people, want, but at critical points, we need more humanizing insight into what makes it essential to them.

The Cost of Wisdom

In the second story, the home’s foyer had a large rug on its floor that had been in the family for generations.  Understanding that, I would have offered to remove my shoes.

We benefit from being curious about the interests, the “for what” the other person engages with, rather than just the “what” or their position. It may seem inefficient, but it pales compared to the value curiosity brings to relationships. Good relationships are win-win; our team leans on telling and hearing stories to build relationships. They are the wellspring of “for whats” and “whys.”

The truthful stories that your neighbor or coworker tells to you and themselves comprise reality as they see it.  Your stories teach your in-laws and teammates history from your the learned or experienced vantage point. Dialogue and stories make our actions and attitudes make sense.  This is where trust begins to form.

Dialogue over Debates and Diatribes. 

As you begin your week, remember that how we engage matters as much as why.  Diatribes and speeches don’t make us good neighbors, and debates require someone to lose.  We like authentic connections and hearing familiar themes in the stories of others.  This week, open and honest dialogue is the strategy; to thrive together should always be the goal. We’ve paid too much for everything else.

Talk more; proclaim less. It’s one of our mottos here at The Center for Practical Ethics (TCPE). Put another way, we might say our goal is to foster conversations rather than diatribes. This task is more difficult than most realize. What we know as ethicists is that merely having conversations isn’t enough. There’s a wide variety of skills needed for fruitful dialogue to take place, and some are harder to come by than others. 

The ideal conversation partner is curious and humble, able to actively listen, knowledgeable about his or her own positions, familiar with basic principles of logical argument, charitable when interpreting claims, and—most importantly—willing to be wrong. Our work centers around equipping students with these skills and helping them navigate the complex ethical issues within our society’s most contentious disagreements. 

This year, National Week of Conversations (NWoC) coincided with Ethics Week here at the University of Mississippi (UM). Many of our events are conversation-based because dialogue is the best way to evaluate the ideas of others and open ourselves up to new information and interpretation of facts, while gaining a better understanding of our own views. 

Two of our events in particular are worth examining more closely to see why NWoC and the work we do at TCPE are critical for sustaining civil society and the myriad public goods we all take for granted. First is our signature Just Conversations event. Students are placed in small groups and given a couple of ethical dilemmas to discuss. Trained student moderators guide the discussion to point out important aspects of the dilemmas, such as logical fallacies, analysis of stakeholders, ethical concepts and assumptions, and varying methods to achieve goals. Students often discover they agree with others—on the dilemma outcome and the details—far more than they expected.

Second, we have invited free speech scholar Sigal Ben-Porath to give a talk about her new book Cancel Wars: How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion, and Renew Democracy. Ben-Porath contends that universities are laboratories of democracy where students must learn to engage with disagreement. If the university is to be a place where truth is discovered, it must take seriously its historic social and educational obligation to train students in the skills needed for civil discourse and critical thinking. Her work is especially relevant in our ever more polarized times. 

What these events demonstrate is that conversations—that is, engaged and fruitful conversations—must take place at all levels. Students must learn to talk to students just as much as faculty must learn to talk to faculty and administrators to administrators. What’s more, these groups must talk to each other because while each of us have a role within academia (faculty, staff, student, dean, vice chancellor, etc.), we are also all citizens who work and live together.

Policies must be made, votes cast, businesses founded, churches attended, friendships established, and life lived. TCPE focuses on the skills of civil discourse by providing opportunities to cultivate those skills through Ethics Week, and highlights conversations that ask us to reflect on the role of universities as part of the NWoC.

Join the conversation.

Join us at Noon on Friday, April 19 for a VIRTUAL lunch and learn session exploring tools to make us better listeners, and in turn, better equipped to engage in meaningful conversations across differences.

The session will be led by Dr. Graham Bodie, professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Media and Communication in the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi.

This event is free and open to the public. Register to receive more information.

REGISTER FOR FREE

The post Look for the “why” when engaging in disagreement appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Lawmakers and advocates regularly refer to Mississippians without health insurance who are in the “coverage gap.” But what is the coverage gap, why does it exist and how does it relate to Medicaid expansion?

The post Q&A: Explaining the health care coverage gap appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Note: This editorial is featured in Mississippi Today’s weekly legislative newsletter. Subscribe to our free newsletter for exclusive access to legislative analysis and up-to-date information about what’s happening under the Capitol dome.

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann is a good man who has dedicated his adult life to helping Mississippians.

That’s why so many Mississippians are baffled by his dug-in position on Medicaid expansion, which right now threatens to kill one of the most transformative policy proposals that has moved through the Capitol since the 1980s.

Medicaid expansion would provide health insurance to 200,000 Mississippians, most of whom work in low-income, no-benefits jobs and cannot otherwise afford it. It would give so many of those people the chance to stay healthy and keep regular work for the first time in their lives. It would bring billions in additional federal money to the poorest state in the nation, where more than half our rural hospitals are on the verge of financial collapse and so many other needs are underfunded.

It would save lives and livelihoods, and it could legitimately change the trajectory of the state.

But Hosemann’s stubborn position on one element of any potential expansion plan — requiring Medicaid recipients to work — jeopardizes the entire proposal. Across the nation, 13 states have tried to implement various forms of a work requirement for Medicaid recipients. The federal government, which runs and funds Medicaid, shot down all 13 efforts.

As legislative leaders will soon meet to try to agree on an expansion bill, Hosemann is doubling down on his insistence that any final plan include the work requirement, adding that its omission from a final bill will not get the Senate votes to pass. If he sticks to his guns, this would almost certainly mean Medicaid expansion dies in Mississippi.

“If you’re not working, then you need to go get a job,” Hosemann said in a conservative radio interview just two days ago, reiterating his desire for a work requirement. “… We want them to be working. We have a 53.9% labor participation rate. That’s horrific, the worst in the country … If you want a job in Mississippi, you can get one. And so we thought it was very important to have people who are working to have the opportunity to have health care. That’s why we passed what we did.”

The state’s labor participation rate is, indeed, dismal. But the lieutenant governor in the interview didn’t mention the very legitimate reasons so many Mississippians, the unhealthiest American citizens with some of the nation’s worst rates of chronic illnesses, cannot work. He did not detail the many financial barriers to those same Mississippians, who are the poorest in the nation, have to finding and keeping steady employment. He did not touch on the state’s child care crisis, which for many Mississippians makes regular child care more expensive than what a person can make in a full-time minimum wage job.

READ MORE: To work, Selinda Walker needs health care. To get health care, she needs work.

The irony of Hosemann being the roadblock to passing Medicaid expansion is not lost on people who closely observe Mississippi politics. For years, Hosemann has been among the only prominent Republican leaders to express openness to it (though he has always refused to use the term “Medicaid expansion”). As he sat largely alone on that limb, conservative Republicans worked hard to use it against him, even helping earn him the moniker “Delbert the Democrat” from his 2023 GOP primary challenger Chris McDaniel.

On expansion and several other issues, Hosemann, who crushed McDaniel in that primary, has been a more moderate voice than most of his right-wing Republican counterparts. In a polarized state in a polarized political era, many people respect him greatly for that. Few modern Mississippi politicians could boast legitimate bipartisan support, but Hosemann certainly is on that list.

I’ve closely covered and gotten to know Hosemann for many years now. I’ve personally witnessed his strong character. I’ve taken up for him a great deal, even landing the nickname “Delbert’s bootlicker-in-chief” from his political opponents last year. What I’ve seen is a measured, thoughtful and wildly intelligent leader. He’s a true numbers guy and a policy wonk, and he’s surrounded himself with smart advisers.

He’s focused as much of his career on health care improvements as any modern Mississippi elected official. Before he entered public life, he was a legal adviser to health care organizations. Since he was elected, he’s visited struggling hospitals and built strong relationships with the most important health leaders in the state, who have persistently talked with him about the benefits of expanding Medicaid. He even visited Arkansas before last year’s legislative session to personally learn and study their unique expansion model. He knows what’s at stake, and he knows the solutions.

Most people assumed Hosemann would be the out-front leader on expansion, but that has not yet happened. He appeared flat-footed when House Speaker Jason White pushed a traditional expansion plan through his GOP-controlled chamber with overwhelming ease. And what he proposed a month later is not an expansion plan at all.

Hosemann and his fellow Senate Republican leaders tossed aside the House proposal without public debate or serious consideration and proposed their own plan that would draw down hundreds of millions dollars less than the House’s traditional expansion plan would. Additionally, the Senate plan would insure between 150,000-200,000 fewer Mississippians than the House plan.

But none of the differences in the House and Senate plans would matter at all if Hosemann keeps his heels dug in on the work requirement. The federal government will not approve it, and a federal court challenge — very much a shot in the dark during a big presidential election year — could cost state taxpayers millions and continue to leave people without health insurance and hospitals without financial help for years to come.

Across the nation, 20 Republican-controlled states expanded Medicaid even without being able to include their coveted work requirement. Those states came up with creative solutions that still drew down the full federal dollars and opened wide the door for increased health care access while instilling the value and importance of hard work.

READ MORE: These Republicans wanted a Medicaid work requirement but couldn’t get approval. So they got creative.

Hosemann, often to his credit, has made a point to let Senate Republicans make their own decisions and not strong-arm them into unfavorable votes. But at the end of the day, some of the most transformative policy proposals require strong leadership. In North Carolina, for instance, the latest red state to expand Medicaid, bold and pragmatic leadership from the Republican Senate leader who previously stood against expansion prevailed.

“I felt that I had a certain responsibility — that if the reasons that I had articulated for 10 years no longer exist, then I had a responsibility to be honest with myself and be honest with other people about that,” Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger told The New York Times last year. “And so I talked to my members, and I told them where I was — and why.”

In 2020, Hosemann employed this exact strategy to help garner enough Republican votes to change the state flag, then the last in the nation containing the Confederate battle emblem. Those were tough votes for many Republicans, but one-by-one, Hosemann brought in the holdout senators, laid out his own position to them and asked them to consider changing their votes. It worked.

If Hosemann has a willingness to find creative solutions around the work requirement or talk to his Republican Senate colleagues about supporting a real Medicaid expansion program, he’s not publicly expressed it. If he doesn’t, lawmakers will likely go home without expansion in early May despite being closer to true transformation than ever.

Whether the effort passes or dies in the coming days will likely be in Hosemann’s hands. But two major questions remain: Can the most prominent Republican champion of Medicaid expansion for years get it across the finish line? And does he even have the desire to?

READ MORE: Senate Republicans should know: This is literally life-or-death.

The post The unlikely Mississippi politician who could tank Medicaid expansion appeared first on Mississippi Today.

With a preliminary identification of remains pulled from the Pearl River as that of missing Belhaven Heights resident Dau Mabil, his brother has secured a restraining order barring the body’s release before an autopsy and U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson is requesting a Justice Department investigation.

A preliminary autopsy of a body recovered from Lawrence County was completed and an official DNA confirmation is expected by early next week, said Bailey Martin, a spokesperson for the Department of Public Safety. In a Facebook post, Lawrence County Sheriff Ryan Everett said the preliminary autopsy “did not reveal any type of foul play. The official determination may be made at a later time, pending further testing.”

On Thursday, Mabil’s brother, Bul Mabil, and his attorney Lisa Ross gathered at the Museum Trail entrance in Belhaven Heights where Dau Mabil was last seen. 

“We want to know what happened to Dau,” said Bul Mabil.  “And if anybody has put their hand on my brother, these people will have to be held accountable. And that’s why I’m here to get to the bottom of it.” 

Video surveillance from the area showed what is believed to be several people moving a body into a truck, said Lisa Ross, Bul Mabil’s attorney. 

They were at the trail to show where Mabil likely fought for his life and to encourage people to come forward with any information about his disappearance. 

On Thursday morning, Hinds County Chancery Court Judge Dewayne Thomas approved Bul Mabil’s request for an emergency temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to prevent the release of Dau’s body until autopsies can be done by the State Medical Examiner’s office and an independent examiner, according to court records. 

“Given the nature of Mr. Mabil’s disappearance and the location of the body found, it is likely that an autopsy will be required to determine if foul play was involved,” Thomas wrote in his order.

Defendants named in the restraining order are Mabil’s wife, Karissa Bowley, the Capitol Police and the State Medical Examiner’s office. Judge Thomas’ order notes that none of the defendants or attorneys representing them came to the Thursday morning hearing. 

“We were very concerned that a body could be released without a proper autopsy being done,” Ross said. “We know that autopsies are very important in determining a cause of death, and this family wants to know the cause of death.”

Bowley did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday afternoon. 

On Wednesday, Thompson asked the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the disappearance of the Jackson man.

“Your immediate attention is necessary because I have been informed your immediate action is necessary because of the circumstances surrounding his disappearance,” Thompson wrote in a Wednesday letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. 

In the letter, Thompson mentioned the discovery of human remains in the Pearl River over the weekend, which he was informed could be Mabil. 

Mabil, 33, was last seen March 25 after his wife said she received a text message from him and he left without his phone. Video footage showed him near Jefferson Street between Fortification and High Street, along his usual walking area between Belhaven Heights and downtown. 

The family filed a missing persons report with the Capitol Police, which has jurisdiction over the Belhaven and downtown area where Mabil lives and was last seen. 

The family said they did not believe that he disappeared without a reason. 

Bul Mabil is calling on Capitol Police and the Jackson Police Department to work together and find out what happened to Dau. A spokesperson from the Department of Public Safety declined to comment further because of an open and active investigation. 

Bul Mabil said his brother was the youngest of six siblings. Their mother who still lives in a refugee camp is devastated by his death. Dau Mabil has a son. whom Bul Mabil said he plans to raise.

The brothers were brought to Jackson after escaping war torn Sudan, and in America they hoped for a better life. 

“None of us believed that we would lose our lives here … and look what happened?” said Bul Mabil. “My brother is not here.”

The post Brother wants answers after body pulled from Pearl River IDed as missing Jackson man appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi Court of Appeals Judge Jim Greenlee will retire from the bench on June 30, leaving a vacancy on the state’s 10-member appellate court.  

Greenlee, an Oxford resident, wrote a letter recently to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves informing him of his decision to retire from the state court and said it was a privilege to serve Mississippi citizens, the state and the justice system for over eight years. 

“It’s been a great privilege and honor to be here and work on these cases,” Greenlee said in a news release. “We are a court that has to give our attention and focus on (appeals of) what occurred in the trial courts and the state agency administrative appeals.”

Reeves will make an appointment to fill Greenlee’s vacancy, and a special election is expected to be scheduled for November 2026, according to a news release from the Administrative Office of the Courts. 

Judges on the Court of Appeals are elected from five districts across the state. Greenlee’s district is located in north Mississippi, so Reeves must appoint a replacement from that area. 

Greenlee’s retirement announcement bookends a long tenure in public life. President George W. Bush nominated him as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Mississippi in 2001 — a position he served in until 2010. 

Former Gov. Phil Bryant appointed Greenlee to a vacancy on the Court of Appeals in January 2016, after Bryant appointed former Court of Appeals Judge James D. Maxwell II to the Mississippi Supreme Court. Greenlee was elected twice without opposition.

The post Appeals Judge Jim Greenlee to retire. Reeves will appoint replacement until ’26 appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Forty-seven-year-old Selinda Walker had to move back in with her elderly mother after an untreated and severe case of Graves’ disease left her unable to work and live independently. 

As a single, low-income individual with no children, Walker has no path toward health care in the state of Mississippi, which remains one of 10 states in the country not to expand Medicaid. And as lawmakers advocate for work requirements in Medicaid expansion bills, Walker faces a Catch-22: she needs health insurance first to get healthy enough to be able to return to work.

The progression of her disease made it impossible for her to continue working at her jobs in retail and car sales. The worst of her symptoms cause her to suffer dizzy spells and temporarily-paralyzing falls throughout the day, among a slew of other problems.

“I feel like I’m a burden to my mother,” Walker, who lives in Columbus, said. “She has to do so much because I can do so little. There are days where I am just useless, the pain is so bad.”

Since she inherited the gene from both her parents, Walker has a textbook case of the autoimmune disease with all of its worst symptoms. The condition, which causes the immune system to mistakenly attack healthy tissue, gets progressively worse if left untreated.

Without health insurance, Walker’s only recourse is a free clinic in Tupelo, about an hour and a half away from where she lives in Columbus. The clinic is able to prescribe her thyroid medications to varying degrees of success, but it’s nothing compared to the quality of life improvement she might experience if she were able to get the proper tests done and potentially undergo a more permanent solution like thyroid surgery. 

One of the 10 medications she’s currently on helps treat the insomnia associated with  Graves’ disease, but it sometimes causes her to sleep through the day. None of the medications help alleviate her back pain or the gut issues, chills or tremors she lives with. 

“It’s very scary to think I don’t have anybody to check me out every month … every day I’m wondering if I’ll wake up,” she mused.

As a childless adult, Walker doesn’t qualify for Medicaid – period. She says the last two times she applied for disability Medicaid, case workers told her they could only help her if she got pregnant.

“I was shocked,” Walker said. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Mississippi is one of the strangest states ever. The only way to help me is if I have children?”

Even if she had children, or if that rule didn’t exist, Walker was at that time making more than 28% of the federal poverty level, a mere $7,000 annually for a family of three  – the maximum salary a Mississippi family can make and still qualify for Medicaid – working full-time at her jobs in retail and car sales. 

And she’s far from the only one. Anyone making at least minimum wage working full-time makes more than 28% of the federal poverty level, which then counts against them and disqualifies them from Medicaid. 

Walker is one of tens of thousands of Mississippians who fall into the “coverage gap.” These individuals don’t qualify for Medicaid under the state’s current restrictions but make less than the 100% of the federal poverty level, about $15,000 a year for an individual, that would qualify them for subsidies that make marketplace insurance affordable.  

The coverage gap exists in states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which presumed all states would automatically expand Medicaid. However, a 2012 Supreme Court ruling made expansion optional for states.

New proposals in the Mississippi Legislature would expand Medicaid, as 40 other states have done, covering families and adults with a household income of up to 138% of the federal poverty level, under the House plan, or 99%, under the Senate plan. 

Both plans would cover more Mississippians than are currently covered. But under both plans, the threat of a work requirement could leave individuals like Walker behind.

Policing and enforcing the work requirement costs more than it would cost to insure the population of unemployed people who would become eligible for Medicaid under expansion. Experts say developing new administrative systems would burden an already precarious system and could cost up to tens of millions of dollars. What’s more is the paperwork can be confusing to enrollees, causing legitimately employed and income-eligible individuals to be denied coverage. 

The House plan would expand Medicaid regardless of whether the federal government approved a special waiver necessary to implement a work requirement. But the Senate plan is entirely contingent on the approval of the work requirement – unlikely to happen under the Biden administration, which has rescinded work requirements previously granted under the Trump administration and not approved new ones. 

Dr. Dustin Gentry, a family physician at Winston Medical Center in Louisville, is a self-described Republican who says he can’t abide by his party’s long-standing belief that Medicaid expansion isn’t the most financially responsible decision for Mississippi. 

“I want Mississippi to have coverage for uninsured patients in the coverage gap, and I want us to do it in a way that makes most sense financially, which is the House plan,” Gentry said. “It doesn’t make sense for us to not take the (federal) money, when everybody else is taking it. It puts us further behind.”

A plan like the Senate’s would leave $1 billion federal dollars on the table. An expansion plan that doesn’t cover people making up to 138% of the federal poverty level, about $20,000 annually for an individual, isn’t considered “expansion” under the Affordable Care Act, and therefore doesn’t qualify for the increased federal match rate, nor the additional two-year financial incentive the ACA gives to newly-expanded states. 

Mississippians are already paying for Medicaid to cover hundreds of thousands of poor, working people – in other states. 

“It’s important to note that the residents of Mississippi and the other holdout states have not been spared from paying for Medicaid expansion,” Dr. Joe Thompson, the Arkansas surgeon general under Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee and Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe told Mississippi Today. “They have been helping to fund it for over a decade through their federal tax dollars, but the money has been flowing into states like Arkansas and Louisiana instead of benefiting the working poor, hospitals, and economies of their home states.”

And hospitals are dying because uninsured individuals’ only recourse for medical care is the emergency room – the most expensive place to receive care. One report estimates that nearly half of all Mississippi’s rural hospitals are at risk of closure due to uncompensated care costs hospitals must front to cover these individuals each year. 

“Everybody’s got heartburn over people ‘getting something they don’t deserve,’” Gentry said. “But these people get free care anyways. They’re getting it from the emergency room, and it’s uncompensated care, and it’s the most expensive way to get care possible. So they’re getting it for free, we’re just bickering over who is going to pay for it.”

And while emergency rooms cannot turn down individuals who require immediate life-saving care, they do nothing to provide the necessary preventative care to improve the quality of life for people like Walker. 

Walker believes if she could get the proper tests and treatment plan, she could go back to work and live independently. But with Gov. Tate Reeves promising to veto any expansion bill and the Senate hung up on a stringent work requirement, the chances Walker will get the care she needs look slim.

The six lawmakers tasked with hammering out a conference report on Medicaid expansion currently have until April 27 to file the bill and until April 29 to adopt it.

The post A coverage gap Catch-22: To work, Selinda Walker needs health care. To get health care, she needs work. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

We recently reported that Mississippi’s community colleges are struggling to secure funding for buildings to house growing workforce development programs. It’s one of a number of challenges that face our state’s vital but oft-overlooked community college system. 

There’s more to report, and we want to hear from the people who know our community colleges best. If you’d like to help us report on your college, please fill out the survey below or reach out to our reporter Molly Minta at mminta@mississippitoday.org. We won’t publish or share anything you tell us without contacting you first.

The post Help us report on Mississippi’s community colleges appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi’s largest community college violated Title IX when it failed to provide a pregnant student with proper accommodations and course adjustments, resulting in the student failing the semester, a federal civil rights agency said last week. 

The student had to pump milk in a bathroom stall because Hinds Community College did not give her a private space, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights found. An instructor even referred to this student’s unborn child as a “parasite” that was “sucking out minerals” from her body. 

“Instead of assisting the Student with her pregnancy-related needs, these College administrators attempted to discourage the Student from trying to complete the Program due to her pregnancy, and even mocked and penalized her for requesting adjustments,” states a letter the agency sent Hinds last week.

Hinds did not respond to Mississippi Today’s requests for comment. In a campus newsletter earlier this week, President Stephen Vacik noted that Hinds had agreed to a settlement with the federal agency, which included revising its policies pertaining to pregnant students and reimbursing the student for her final semester at Hinds. 

“The whole situation was regrettable, and shouldn’t have happened, but we are committed to meeting the required activities set forth in the agreement with OCR,” Vacik wrote. “Our goal is to be better prepared in the future to serve the needs of our students.” 

Title IX is a federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or education program receiving federal funding.

The student’s name, area of study, and the identity of the instructor were redacted from the Office of Civil Rights letter, but the spring 2021 incident took place at the Jackson campus. The dean of health sciences was involved. 

As a result of Hinds’ treatment of her, the student had to retake her final semester, causing financial hardship, the agency found. But Hinds repeatedly denied the student’s requests to reconsider her grades, and the health sciences dean ultimately told the student that “caring for a newborn while still trying to attend class, [redacted content], and study were likely contributing factors to you being unsuccessful in the course.”

Hinds also claimed the student had not reported issues with the instructor’s treatment of her earlier, even though the student had repeatedly done so, according to the Office of Civil Rights. The agency found the college had “no process in place” to handle the student’s complaints. 

Nationally, more than one-fifth of community college students are parents, and the majority of those are mothers who are likely to be unmarried. Though these students are more likely to have higher grades than students who are not parents, they can struggle to graduate on time due largely to a lack of childcare and financial support. 

In the Hinds’ student’s case, the college’s treatment of her was “humiliating and degrading,”  according to the federal government. 

Before giving birth, the student’s instructor bemoaned giving her breaks to express milk, according to emails reviewed by the feds, writing to other college employees to ask, “do I just let her do it? . . . it’s not like she would leave a lecture at 9:30 because of her ‘pumping schedule’.” 

The student delivered three weeks early after developing preeclampsia, a condition she attributed to the stress caused by the instructor’s treatment of her. 

While recovering in the hospital, the student attended a Zoom meeting for class, but had to leave 20 minutes early for medical treatment. Because she had not notified her instructor that she had to leave earlier, the student was marked absent for the entire class. And she was not provided study materials until the afternoon of a test, which she ultimately failed. 

When the student returned to school, the initial room she was provided to pump in had a glass wall. Instead, she pumped sitting on a toilet in a bathroom stall. Her uneven pumping schedule resulted in pain and anxiety about her milk supply. 

Meanwhile, her instructor complained about the student when she was absent from class, telling her fellow students that she was “allegedly pumping” and casting doubt on whether she would be able to graduate from the program. 

The instructor also belittled the student in front of her peers, the agency found. 

“Later that day, when the Student finished her pumping session just before lunch, the Student stated the [redacted content] Instructor told the Student in front of the other students, “you cannot pump and then go to lunch,” the letter states. “You have to pump during your lunch break, and you are supposed to find me and tell me anytime you are going to pump.”

The student ultimately submitted a Title IX complaint. That instructor resigned, though Hinds claimed during the course of the Title IX investigation that it had fired the instructor. The three campus police officers assigned to investigate the complaint did not interview key witnesses, the agency found.

The post Hinds Community College treatment of pregnant student violated Title IX, feds say appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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When the North Carolina legislative session ends, Jim Burgin, a conservative Republican state senator who serves as chair of his state’s Senate Health Care Committee, will go back to his daily life as a businessman.

The owner of an insurance company and a partner in a local car dealership group, Burgin fully understands the virtue of hard work. That’s why when Medicaid expansion, the federal program that 10 states including Mississippi have refused to pass, came up for debate in his legislature over the past few years, he wasn’t immediately sold.

“I don’t think we ought to have any kind of government program that people stay on the rest of their lives,” Burgin told Mississippi Today in an interview this week. “Like most of my Republican colleagues, I wanted to put a work requirement in. But we realized the feds would never approve it, so we had to think about what we really wanted to do as it related to work.”

Many Mississippi Republican lawmakers currently face the same dilemma. Though Medicaid expansion is being seriously considered here for the first time, Senate Republicans, led by Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, appear convinced that the only way the state should expand Medicaid is if a work requirement is in place. But with the federal government having shot down 13 states’ previous efforts to implement a work requirement, Mississippi Today reached out to leaders in North Carolina, the most recent Republican-led state to expand, to see how they came to an agreement.

READ MORE: Mississippi lawmakers look to other states’ Medicaid expansions. Is North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia worth copying?

Burgin and his colleagues, knowing the feds wouldn’t allow the work requirement, went to the drawing board to determine if they could come up with a Medicaid expansion bill that still promoted work without requiring it. They started with a “trigger law,” of sorts, to mandate that if the federal government ever changed their policy on allowing states to implement a work requirement, North Carolina would move immediately to adopt one. They also added a separate trigger that allowed the state to immediately drop out of the expansion program if Congress ever defunded it or changed its funding structure.

They also developed some creative ideas for spending the additional federal dollars the state would receive from the expansion program that were designed to promote work. Shortly after they expanded Medicaid, the North Carolina lawmakers designated hundreds of millions in expansion “signing bonus” funds on mental health reform. The state’s mental health system was in crisis with major funding concerns, so Republicans appropriated $835 million — all money they got from the feds to expand Medicaid — to rebuild the crumbled system.

“That’s going to help so many hospitals and law enforcement officers who often had nothing to do with mentally ill people but take them to emergency rooms, whether those people had health insurance or not,” Burgin said. “Hospitals will never have to treat or pay for care for people in those situations in ERs ever again.”

Additionally, North Carolina Republicans in the coming weeks will work on getting the federal government to grant a waiver to spend federal Medicaid dollars on providing free community college — and workforce skills training — to North Carolinians enrolled in the Medicaid expansion program. Additionally, some Republicans want to add child care vouchers to that list of offerings.

“This is all to get people jobs and to keep them working and ultimately to get them off Medicaid,” Burgin said. “Even though it can’t be a requirement, we’re promoting work. We want to make it easier and better for people to get work that they won’t want to stay on Medicaid. They’ll want a job and hopefully eventually get on a group health plan through their employer.”

So what ultimately convinced Burgin, who wanted the work requirement all along, to move forward on expansion even without it?

“Billions of dollars,” he said plainly. “Look, I’m a business guy. I don’t spend money, I invest money. I looked at (Medicaid expansion) as a great investment. I had a fiduciary responsibility to my constituents to take that money. So we wrote a bill that said that if the feds changed the work requirement, if they change anything, we can add it here or opt out of our program altogether.

“I just couldn’t turn down billions of dollars that we needed in so many areas,” Burgin said. “And we get to spend that on a wide variety of things, and all of it is designed to get people across this state working.”

READ MORE: Mississippi leaving more than $1 billion per year on table by rejecting Medicaid expansion

Republican state Rep. Donny Lambeth was the primary author of what became North Carolina’s Medicaid expansion program.

For years before an expansion program actually passed, Lambeth filed numerous expansion bills that included work requirements.

“I was a big advocate for work requirements because, well, I felt like it was just one of those things,” Lambeth said. “We shouldn’t want to just add more people to Medicaid rolls. You have to figure out how to help them and get them off Medicaid and into the workforce. But when we talked to people in Washington, it was obvious there was no way, if we went through all the trouble to get votes and get it passed, we would get a work requirement.”

READ MORE: How Medicaid expansion could have saved Tim’s leg — and changed his life

So Lambeth, like Burgin, went to the drawing board. They wrote into their expansion plan a provision similar to red-state Montana: State government agencies would work with private partners who had experience with job training to create a program that would pay for Medicaid enrollees to get job training. They couldn’t require people to participate, but they could make it worth their while.

“We looked at what other Republican states that had expanded had done,” Lambeth said. “What we came up with in lieu of the work requirement was an optional jobs training program. The idea was that even though you’ve got the vast majority of people on Medicaid working, they’re working in low-income jobs. They couldn’t afford health insurance even though they worked.  The theory is that if you take advantage of expansion dollars from the federal government with a job training program like this, you can go back and further your education. You can then get a better job, have a higher standard of living, get off Medicaid and be able to afford your health insurance.”

Peg O’Connell, a health care advocate and consultant who for several years led North Carolina’s push to expand Medicaid, explained how the jobs training program worked in Montana before her state included it in its program.

“A man had been a hit-or-miss carpenter and really wanted a commercial drivers license,” O’Connell said. “So the Montana caseworker under their expansion program helped get him his CDL. They paid for him to take the classes as well as lodging when he had to travel to take his exams, and they even bought him a pair of work boots. This man is now doing what he wants to be doing, he’s got full-time employment with health insurance, and he has worked himself off the Medicaid program. That’s the idea behind our program here.”

Lambeth, like Burgin, is a small business owner. He owns a logistics contracting company, and he “can’t afford to offer my employees health insurance,” he said.

“Are there some quote-unquote deadbeats, people who are not working, playing off the system? Sure,” Lambeth said. “But we were able to identify the farmers in the east part of the state, small, mom-and-pop businesses that were growing at significant rates but couldn’t quite afford to offer health insurance, hard-working people who desperately wanted and needed health insurance but couldn’t afford it. We saw that the vast majority of these people are working, and the ones who weren’t working, we felt like if we could get them training or education and child care, that would help get them off Medicaid.

“If we’re really all about getting people working, then let’s figure out ways to work within the system, draw down those billions of dollars, and use them to get them working,” he continued. “It was really that simple.”

READ MORE: Gov. Roy Cooper, the most recent state leader to expand Medicaid, has advice for Mississippi lawmakers

Burgin and Lambeth both supported work requirements but saw they wouldn’t get approval from the federal government. They listened to their constituents, they considered the heart of their desire to get North Carolinians working and they found creative solutions.

As Mississippi lawmakers consider Medicaid expansion over the next few days, what advice might the North Carolina Republicans offer to their counterparts here in the Magnolia State?

“You tell any of the hardest nos, the most conservative ones, that if they have any doubts, give them my number. My cell is 919-207-7263,” Burgin said. “I’ll be happy to answer any question they may have and talk to them about why this is so beneficial. I’ve been tracking Mississippi. I testified the other day to Kansas lawmakers. We’ve already talked to folks in Georgia, Florida, Kansas and now Mississippi. All of these holdout states are looking at the same thing saying, ‘We’ve put it off. Why did you do it?’ For me and my Republican colleagues, it came down to a business decision. How could we, in good faith, leave billions on the table?”

Lambeth answered the question with an anecdote.

“I heard from just dozens and dozens of North Carolinians while we were debating this,” Lambeth said. “But I got one letter, in particular, from a Christmas tree farmer in Ash County. She couldn’t afford health insurance, and she was worried they were going to lose their farm because of out-of-pocket medical bills they had.

“These are real people. They’re not the traditional Medicaid where they’re poor and not trying to improve their lives. They are hard-working people just not able to afford health insurance. I promise the average Mississippian is not much different than the average North Carolinian in that way. Why would we be in the positions we’re in and not help them? I mean really, why?”

READ MORE: The Christian argument for Medicaid expansion

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