Medicaid Plays Big Role in Mississippi Budget Talks

“Medicaid is such a moving target,” Clarke said Wednesday. “That’s what makes it hard to figure out.”

The budget-writing process started months ago, with state agency directors presenting their initial requests in September to lame-duck members of the Joint Legislative Budget Committee. Democrats lost the House majority in the November general election and Republicans now control both chambers for the first time since Reconstruction.

Rep. Bobby Moak, D-Bogue Chitto, said House Democrats will monitor the final budget negotiations, even if fewer of them will be directly involved in those talks than they were in the past few years.

“We’ll be really, really interested and watching very closely when it comes to education and it comes to mental health,” Moak said. “And even libraries. They had such a huge disparity, huge cut in the Republican budget. We’ll be particularly watching those three items.”

Clarke and Frierson said they expect the state to spend roughly $24 million to $27 million more on elementary and secondary education in the coming year, compared to this year. They said that’s still more than $250 million short of full funding under the Mississippi Adequate Education Program.

MAEP was put into state law in 1997 and is a complex formula designed to give each school district enough money to meet midlevel academic standards, providing extra money for districts with higher percentages of poor students. The formula has been fully funded only twice, in the election-year legislative sessions of 2003 and 2007.

Frierson said he expects lawmakers to fully fund the state Department of Health’s request of $2.5 million for AIDS treatment. Officials said without the money, Mississippi will lose $5 million in federal funding for AIDS patients.

“It’s one of those that you don’t want to miss out on, especially on something as important as that is because that medicine is very expensive for people who are fighting the disease,” he said.

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