Hood's action disappointing

By Staff
We are disappointed that Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood has forsaken his main client the state of Mississippi and sided with others in the seemingly never-ending battle over state funding for Medicaid. By joining in a lawsuit against his own employer, Hood has shown a blatant disregard for what must be one of the state's main priorities: getting a handle on escalating Medicaid costs.
Unlike Gov. Haley Barbour, who is taking the heat for a Legislature-passed effort to control Medicaid's costs, Hood has offered no solutions. If the attorney general wants to weigh in on this issue, he should at the very least have an alternative proposal for saving enough dollars to protect the program over the long term.
Since January, more than 48,000 additional Mississippians have gone on Medicaid because our state has the most liberal Medicaid program in the country. It is not just for poverty level, poor or disabled people. Medicaid was expanded so much during the term of Gov. Ronnie Musgrove that, today, the program is so costly that it may collapse of its own weight. Today, about one-quarter of all Mississippians receive Medicaid benefits of some sort or another.
The demise of Medicaid would be a horror and yet people like Jim Hood are working against the state's interests, interests he is sworn to defend, for the sake of political expediency.
Responsible leaders do more than grouse and sue. They work together for real solutions. Hood should put the influence of his office behind finding such solutions in the Medicaid dilemma.