Jackson Free Press

Continuing his hints at a 2012 presidential run, Gov. Haley Barbour addressed the Conservative Political Action Committee's annual conference Saturday in Washington, D.C., with his argument for electing a Republican president. Barbour touted his own record in Mississippi, trotting out a list of accomplishments that requires some closer scrutiny. Here's a partial list of some of Barbour's statements and the facts behind them.

Thank you for that warm welcome. Speaking of warm, this global warming's about to freeze me to death.

This hardly needs explanation. Weather and climate are different things, and it's entirely possible for the global average temperature (measured over the course of an entire year) to rise, even as particular regions on the globe experience periods of lower temperatures or greater participation. In fact, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and Britain's national meteorological office, 2010 the hottest year, globally, on record. Nine of the 10 warmest years on record were in the last decade.

It's a lot easier to grow yourself out of the deficit than it is to spend yourself out of the deficit. Let me give you a little personal example. In my first four years as governor of Mississippi, we got rid of a huge budget shortfall because revenue went up by 40 percent without raising anybody's taxes. Revenue went up because we had more taxpayers with more taxable income. That's the way to get your balance sheet where you want it.

Barbour failed to mention that other hobbyhorse of his, Hurricane Katrina, which boosted state tax revenues--especially sales tax--enormously in the 2006 fiscal year. While state tax revenue increased by 4 percent in the 2004 fiscal year and 8 percent in the 2005 fiscal year, it was the 2006 fiscal year that brought the state's first balanced budget in years.

Our liberal media elite especially criticized my savings in Medicaid, our only big entitlement in Mississippi. Those savings have been very large: hundreds of millions of dollars. One way was to make sure everyone receiving Medicaid was actually eligible. ... The key reform we made when I got in office was to require recipients who aren't in nursing homes or immobile because of their health to reestablish their Medicaid eligibility in person, annually. It's funny how many people never even showed up. After my reforms--and this was in good economic times--the rolls fell from nearly 750,000 to fewer than 600,000, a reduction of more than 20 percent.

While Barbour's much-touted face-to-face requirement did reduce the state's Medicaid rolls, it primarily did so by eliminating eligible recipients who could not make the annual appointment for various reasons, including child-care and work responsibilities. A 2007 report (PDF) by the Mississippi Center for Justice found that 90 percent of the "new" applications accepted by the state Medicaid office are for families and children whose coverage had lapsed.

Another change was to emphasize strong management, so our Medicaid error rate is now the fourth lowest in the country, less than half the national average. About half of the error rate for the federal Medicare program. Now why is that important? I'll tell you why. Our state taxpayers save about $50 million a year, just because of our lower error rate.

Barbour's reference to the state's "Medicaid error rate" is an allusion to the federal Payment Error Rate Measurement (PERM) program for Medicaid. PERM is a highly technical way of measuring the frequency of mistakes in states' eligibility determinations or payment of medical claims. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has pointed out, PERM "does not measure fraud."

In fact, the 2007 Center for Justice report found that, from 2003 to 2007, the state's administrative spending on Medicaid increased 74 percent despite a 5 percent drop in enrollment. Spending on the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) rose 150 percent during the same period, while enrollment in the program decreased 11 percent.

Previous Comments

ID

162082

Comment

Good point about Katrina, but for Katrina Barbour would have been noted as the worst governor of all time

Author

Powerman

Date

2011-02-15T08:59:53-06:00