Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour thinks Mississippi’s poor people are too well off.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) said states should also be free, for instance, to compel Medicaid patients to pay for part of their medicine, saying, “We have people pull up at the pharmacy window in a BMW and say they can’t afford their co-payment.”

Glenn Kessler fact checks this statement, and notes,

Mississippi provides some of the lowest Medicaid benefits to working adults in the nation. A parent who isn’t working can qualify only if annual family income is less than 24 percent of the poverty line. Working parents qualify only if they make no more than 44 percent of the federal poverty level. Seniors and people with disabilities are eligible with income at 80 percent of the poverty line. Pregnant women do better — they’re eligible with income up to 185 percent of the poverty level.

Translated from the federal poverty guidelines, that means a working Mississippi couple with one child could earn no more than $8,150 a year and still qualify for Medicaid, seniors and people with disabilities could earn no more than $8,700, and a pregnant woman could earn no more than $20,000 a year.

Kessler then checked classified ads in Mississippi newspapers and found “Four grand, for instance, would get you a 1996 BMW 328i with 237,000 miles on it.” But four grand seems a stretch for people with an annual income of eight grand, don’t you think?

And what does it say about the decline of American cars that the Cadillac has been replaced by a foreign car as the metaphor for decadent luxury?

Anyway, reading further into Kessler’s article, Barbour says that people on Medicaid only have to say they can’t afford the co-payment, and then they don’t have to pay it. Lucky duckies! Gov. Barbour wants to put an end to that and make those people cough up their co-payments, because they are cheating the providers.

However, seems to me a working couple with one child making no more than $8,150 a year probably can’t afford much of anything, including co-payments.

Elsewhere: Palm trees grow in Wisconsin! But wouldn’t that be proof of global warming?