New MHA CEO Richard Roberson shares insights
After a year that saw several hospital and healthcare system members leave the Mississippi Hospital Association, Richard Roberson took over as CEO with a plan to recoup those losses. Roberson sat down with the Mississippi Business Journal for an exclusive interview about his upcoming first days on the job, thoughts on various issues, and future plans.
MBJ: You’re an Ole Miss law graduate who has practiced law in government service for nearly two decades. You showed early leadership abilities as president of the student congress at Baylor in 1992. What appealed to you about taking the CEO position of the Mississippi Hospital Association?
Richard Roberson: For the last 20 years of my professional career, I’ve been focused on healthcare. I was with the Attorney General’s office under Mike Moore, when Gov. Fordice was in office, and was asked to serve as Medicaid’s legal counsel. Then I spent five years at the Department of Education. When Gov. Barbour came into office, and Jim Hood was Attorney General in 2004, there was a lot of controversy surrounding Medicaid (the Poverty-Level Aged and Disabled or PLAD, program beneficiaries being phased out in Mississippi) and I was asked to come back to Medicaid. From then on, I’ve been singularly focused on healthcare, and moving the needle forward for Mississippi. After I left Medicaid and was in private practice for a few years, I worked with pretty much every type of healthcare client under the sun—hospitals, nursing homes, independent physicians, dentists, physical therapists, pharmacists and pharmacies. I got an up-close, personal perspective on their issues and what mattered most to them.
MHA was one of my clients in private practice, and I moved over to MHA in 2015 to do their policy, legislative, and general counsel work. We developed legislation for a Mississippi provider-sponsored health plan nearly a decade ago and I was asked to lead Mississippi True (dba TrueCare) in early 2023. To my knowledge, TrueCare is the only provider-sponsored health insurance plan in the country, operated by as many hospitals and health systems as there are on my board. While I was leading TrueCare, I kept tabs on things going on at MHA. I’m very passionate about making positive differences for all Mississippians and that’s what attracted me to the job.
MBJ: How do you intend to recoup the losses of memberships last year?
RR: I plan to make sure we rebuild relationships with those members, go out and listen to folks who left, and lay the foundation to get them back in. MHA is still here to serve the hospital industry.
MBJ: How do you intend to tackle top national issues such as the soaring cost of providing healthcare and declining government reimbursement, for healthcare services? For example, We saw in an AHA report that overall hospital expenses increased by 17.5% between 2019 and 2022. At the same time, Medicare reimbursement increased only 7.5%.
RR: It’s important for Mississippians to know that Mississippi hospitals and healthcare systems have the lowest, or are at least among the lowest, costs for hospital care in the country, according to the Kaiser Foundation. And that’s across three different categories.
That said, it still takes money to run a hospital, to pay physicians, nurses, pharmaceuticals, and for the latest and greatest medical equipment, not to mention the bevy of staff it takes to make it all work. For Mississippi hospitals, nearly 70% of payments come from government payers. About 20% comes from commercial insurers, and about 10% are uninsured.
The good news is, for a year now, hospitals have received a significant increase in their supplemental payments for Medicaid patients. CMS finally started to allow states to use a national average commercial rate to pay for Medicaid patients. That has helped tremendously, and hospitals appreciate the Governor and Mississippi Medicaid requesting the help.
MBJ: We understand some improve-ments were made in 2016 to improve the state’s Certificate of Need (CON) laws, but efforts to significantly reform them continue to be thwarted. What needs to be done?
RR: We’ve got the opportunity to look at CON reforms in some meaningful ways to help patients and eliminate some burdens. We need to collect good data on all entities required to go through the CON process so that policymakers can be better informed when they’re looking at determining need and whether a population can support a particular service to keep costs low. Right now, you have to rely on data published in the state health plan that may be two, three, or maybe four years old. Populations have shifted. Also, it’s difficult to have an intelligent conversation about CON reforms when hospitals are still required, by EMTALA law, to provide emergency care to individuals regardless of their ability to pay. Much work is to be done.