Opinion

Opinion: South Carolina Heads Down a Dead-end Street in Rejecting Medicaid Expansion

Published

7 years ago

July 27, 2019

South Carolina’s James Louis Petigru was a Civil War-era lawyer, judge, congressman and most notably the attorney general who opposed South Carolina’s use of nullification of federal laws and, after Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, opposed state secession.

He famously quipped, after learning that his state had seceded from the Union, “South Carolina is too small to be a republic and too large to be an insane asylum.”

While not insane, the state was a little nutty when it rejected Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). South Carolina has one of the highest percentages of uninsured people in the country.

The leaders of the state are leading the people down a dead-end street. They support tax cuts for the rich and health care cuts for the poor. South Carolina is a red state with blue needs — more health care, less poverty, better schools and fewer jails.

Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and President Donald Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, was born in Bamberg, South Carolina, a small city of approximately 3,600 people.

The Bamberg County Hospital, where Haley was born, closed on April 30, 2012 for lack of money. Not only did people lose health services but Bamberg County Hospital workers lost their jobs.

Many other small rural hospitals and workers faced the same fate in South Carolina when the state rejected the $10 billion over 10 years it would have received if it had expanded Medicaid.

A recent article in the Greenville News reported that when hospital beds fill up in the state, patients are boarded in emergency rooms. It is inhumane and economically foolish and morally wrong to argue against expanding Medicaid when 50,000 jobs and greater health care is involved.

Arguing against keeping rural hospitals open, like Bamberg County, makes no sense. It’s arguing for sickness and unnecessary death.

It’s a national problem, but recently South Carolina’s Greenville News documented the situation locally when 80-year-old Ron Miller of Pickens County collapsed at home two days after surgery and had to be rushed back to the hospital and readmitted. The problem was there were no available beds at that hospital or any of the hospitals in Greenville.

The paper reported, “The phenomenon, called boarding, occurs when hospitals hold patients in the ER until they find a bed for them on a medical floor.” Dr. Ryan Stanton, a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians, an ER physician with Central Emergency Physicians in Lexington, Kentucky, has indicated it’s a growing problem across the nation. It’s a simple problem of supply and demand.

There are more patients than there are beds. A further concern is whether patients forced to stay in the ER for long periods of time have the same equipment made available to them and receive the same level of care that those in hospital beds receive.

Expanding Medicaid could help, but South Carolina is a state that pretends to resent big government and federal dollars, even though 32 percent of its general revenue comes from Washington for education, health care, airports, highways, seaports, the big military presence in the state and more. South Carolina couldn’t exist without federal dollars. It, apparently, just doesn’t want to receive Medicaid funds for its neediest citizens.

There is a better South Carolina on the horizon and Congressman Joe Cunningham (SC-01) is an example. He’s the new Democrat from the Lowcountry and he’s worked to reinstate the ban on offshore drilling, protect Lowcountry jobs from damaging tariffs and fix South Carolina’s ailing infrastructure. On Jan. 3, 2019, he said he was “ready to roll up his sleeves and get to work” and he has. South Carolina needs more Joe Cunninghams.

We all do.

Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.

Posts by Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.

Arts and Culture

COMMENTARY: Black Music is the Sound of Black Freedom: Let Us Reclaim Both This Juneteenth

Black Music Month started when Black Music Association members Ed Wright, Kenny Gamble and his wife, journalist and radio host Dyanna Williams were able to persuade President Jimmy Carter to establish the observation on June 7, 1979.

Published

1 day ago

June 9, 2026

Oakland Post

Robert Johnson (1911-1938) is thought of as the godfather of blues music, especially Delta blues. The 29 songs recorded by him during his short life have been of massive inspiration to guitarists and musicians over the last 80 years. Public domain photo.

By Wanda Ravernell

Black Music Month and Juneteenth are inextricably linked – Black music is the sound of our freedom.

From the plaintive moans of the enslaved Africans’ ‘sorrow songs,’ to the fields of Civil War battle where Black soldiers picked up abandoned bugles, to the upright piano played in juke joints on Saturday night and churches come Sunday morning, our ancestors’ innovation in the face of want, fear, degradation, and hopelessness has yielded genres of music imitated ’round the world.

In 2000, Congress made it official. In 2009, Pres. Barack Obama changed the name to African American Music Heritage Month and in 2023, Pres. Joe Biden changed it back to Black Music Month, two years after he declared Juneteenth a national holiday, the result of a movement led by Opal Lee.

Our ancestors battle for freedom over these last 400 years and the music that allowed them expression of their humanity deserved to be honored.

But we may be losing sight of the value of their sacrifices.

‘Sing a Song Full of the Faith That the Dark past Has Taught Us…’

Along with the long-known exploitation of Black musicians whose recordings were stolen by record companies, the commercialization of Juneteenth feels like another kind of theft.

I had never heard of Juneteenth until I moved to the Bay Area from my hometown of Philadelphia. I didn’t know it was one of many freedom festivals celebrated by descendants of enslaved people in the United States.

Emancipation Day was Jan. 1 in Pennsylvania, April 16 in Wash., D.C., May 20 in Florida, and Aug. 8 in Kentucky. But Juneteenth, June 19, has the most renown, known in Texas as the ‘colored peoples’ Fourth of July.’

It was marked by parades, beauty pageants, rodeos, backyard barbecues and church picnics.

Yes, church.

The formerly enslaved began the day praying in thanks for their freedom just as they had prayed for Jubilee – the day of freedom – when they had chains on their feet and hands. They ‘testified’ about their past suffering and how they had managed to overcome.

And they sang.

Although, we will not hold it this year, Omnira Institute’s Juneteenth Ritual of Remembrance recalled this part of Juneteenth with prayers in the languages of the African captives. In the middle of the ceremony, a soloist would lead us in singing “Many Thousand Gone” while we took turns reciting portions of the Emancipation Proclamation, the news of freedom that took more than two years to reach Texas – two months after the Civil War ended.

“Many Thousand Gone” was famously recorded by Black luminary Paul Robeson in 1947:

“No more auction block for me,

No more, no more

No more auction black for me

Many thousand gone.”

Other verses refer to the ‘pint of salt’ and the ‘driver’s lash,’ the realities of enslavement that they had survived.

‘Sing a Song Full of the Hope That the Present has Brought Us’

All of the genres of African American music have at their root songs like that, the essence being, as Stevie Wonder, wrote, “the joy inside our pain.” So Black music is not just music. It is our story, our history, our very strength.

During the Civil Rights Movement, which peaked 100 years after slavery ended, the people testified that it was the freedom songs – based on spirituals – that gave them the heart to march, face attack dogs, fire hoses, beatings, and shootouts with vigilantes.

The music reminded them that power was in the people. That music, our music, can do so again. We don’t have to accept the commodification of the products of our culture.

The power of those songs is showing a resurgence across the South as we battle again for the right to self-determination through the ballot box.

Those songs are the voices of our ancestors, voices forged in their blood, their sweat, their tears, joy and, above all, faith. Those songs, those prayers live in our blood and our very breath.

This Juneteenth, let us reclaim those holy voices expressed in Black music for ourselves. It is our birthright. It can neither be bought nor sold. No more. Never again.

Wanda Ravernell is the executive director of Omnira Institute, sponsor for 18 years of the Juneteenth Ritual of Remembrance and Oakland’s 11^th Annual Black-Eyed Pea Festival, which will take place on Sept. 12.