Senate Public Health Committee Chairman Hob Bryan, D-Amory, called this week to say that House Democrats, the media and hospital executives who characterize the hospital tax adopted by the Senate as a “$167-per-day hospital bed tax” are misrepresenting the Medicaid bill he authored.

“The way opponents of the bill and the media in trying to explain it are talking, SB 2013 somehow levies a brand new $167-per-day tax on hospital patients,” said Bryan. “The public is being led to believe that this $167-per-day is something new that either they or Medicaid or their private insurance company will have to pay when they go into the hospital and that’s simply not true.”

Perhaps a little perspective on Sen. Bryan might be in order. Bryan is serving his 25th year in the state Senate. Mercurial, brilliant and generally acknowledged as a master of the state constitution and the Senate’s rules, Bryan is the GOP’s worst nightmare in the Legislature — a progressive Democrat who won’t back down from a fight and who knows both the law and the rules better than the vast majority of his Republican counterparts.

Only those who don’t know Bryan would bite on the suggestion that he’d serve as anyone’s lapdog or anyone’s front man on legislation he didn’t believe was sound.

Yet it was Bryan who authored SB 2013 — the hospital tax package that Barbour, Republican Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, 41 state senators and House Republicans are supporting as the lone funding mechanism needed to stabilize the state’s Medicaid program.

Opponents of SB 2013 have called it a tax on the sick or worse. Bryan disagrees.

“This is a revision of the existing hospital assessment that was in place until three years ago that generated a total of about $200 million a year when the federal government disallowed a $90 million portion of it,” said Bryan. “The hospital assessment contained in SB 2013 — one approved by the Mississippi Hospital Association and the federal government — replaces that $90 million portion that was disallowed along with a MHA-recommended revision of the rest of the prior assessment.”

Bryan said the “$167-per-day” figure is one manufactured to create fear, but that it includes prior hospital assessments that most of the opponents voted for and supported in the past.

“I think it’s very frustrating that so much attention is given to who will win or lose or who will get blamed if cuts are made,” said Bryan. “The hospital assessment is good public policy and good public policy makes everyone look good just like bad public policy makes everyone look bad.”

But lest Bryan’s fellow Democrats decide he’s carrying Barbour’s political water in this fight, Bryan offered this frank assessment.

“I don’t blame the Democrats in the House for being angry with Gov. Barbour,” said Bryan. “He interfered in their leadership election, he tried hard to get many of them beat for re-election and whatever anger they feel for those actions, Gov. Barbour has it coming to him.”

But Bryan said partisan anger is no reason not to adopt what he believes is a fiscally sound Medicaid funding source.

“I think when we got here in January, the House, the Senate and Gov. Barbour were in a position that they could each kill everything but all found it difficult to pass anything,” said Bryan. “This bill (SB 2013) it the outline of an agreement to spend money appropriately for public health care.”

Bryan said the suggestion that either he is in political “lockstep” with Barbour is “absurd.”

“The House Democrats fighting with Gov. Barbour are my political friends,” Bryan said. “But that doesn’t change the fact the hospital assessment should be adopted. These characterizations of the assessment as a ‘patient tax’ are nothing more than propaganda designed to induce fear.”