Barbour On Mississippi's 18 Percent Uninsured: No One Lacks Access To Health Care

WASHINGTON -- Mississippi Gov. and potential Republican presidential candidate Haley Barbour caused a bit of stir on Wednesday morning for his rigorous defense of his state’s health care statistics.

Speaking to the Boston Globe, the governor dismissed the idea that Mississippi would benefit from an infusion of federal resources to help expand Medicaid access, even with nearly 18 percent of the state’s population (half a million residents) lacking primary care.

“There’s nobody in Mississippi who does not have access to health care,’’ Barbour said. “One of the great problems in the conversation is the misimpression that if you don’t have insurance, you don’t get health care.”

In an email to the Huffington Post, a Barbour aide clarified that the governor was referring to "emergency room procedures" when talking about universal access.

"The Governor is eminently aware the status quo is not optimal for Mississippians, as it's neither cost effective nor does it address his preventative care concerns," the aide added. "It's for those reasons that Gov. Barbour has promoted the concept of a "medical home" for Medicaid benefices and has advocated for private market solutions."

Even before the clarification, however, Democrats were jumping on the line, with one operative pointing out the similarity between Barbour's remark and an infamous comment President George W. Bush made about health care reform in July 2007.

“The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America," Bush said. "After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

Emergency room access is not, of course, synonymous with health care coverage. And Bush was chastised both for equating the two and for not acknowledging that the costs of those emergency procedures are passed along to other consumers (and for not recognizing that emergency rooms were required to treat all patients starting only in 1986).