Business Blog

Ties to military operations have exempted Golden Triangle Regional Airport near Columbus and Key Field in Meridian from closing under a funding cutoff set to begin April 7 under the federal budget sequester. Five other “contract towers” in the state — Tupelo, Greenville, Oliver Branch, Jackson, and Bay St. Louis – failed to gain exemptions [...]

Officials in Butler County, Ohio, have indicted a famous groundhog for the rash of cold winter-type weather we’ve been having, television news station Fox 19 in Cincinnati reports. The indictment, filed by Butler County Prosecuting Attorney Michael Gmoser, alleges that on or about February 02, 2013, at Gobbler’s Knob, Punxsutawney Phil did purposely, and with [...]

The White House is encouraging skeptical state officials to expand Medicaid by subsidizing the purchase of private insurance for low-income people, even though that approach might be somewhat more expensive, federal and state officials say. Ohio and Arkansas are negotiating with the Obama administration over plans to use federal Medicaid money to pay premiums for [...]

One of the country’s largest pharmacy chains is asking its workers to find out how fat they are and then disclose it to their insurance provider. Not only is that company, CVS Caremark, telling workers who use its health insurance plan to have a doctor determine their height, weight, body fat, blood pressure and other [...]

Liberty Institute and the Center for Religious Expression says its client, Tupelo-based American Family Association (AFA) has filed a motion and brief for a preliminary injunction against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The motion was filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, Aberdeen Division. AFA owns [...]

The healthiest Mississippians live in Desoto County and the least healthiest in the Delta’s Quitman County. Those are among the conclusions in the fourth annual County Health Rankings released Wednesday by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. The County Health Rankings rank the overall health of nearly every [...]

Catfish producers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South notched a key victory last week with a Commerce Department decision to put duties on frozen catfish fillets exported from Vietnam. The Commerce Department ruling marks a reversal of several years of refusing to place tariffs on government-subsidized Vietnamese pangasius catfish imported to the United States [...]

Three weeks ago, when Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe was in Washington for the National Governors Association meeting, he made a trip to Health and Human Services. Beebe had an unusual Obamacare proposal. The Arkansas legislature did not want to expand Medicaid for those under 133 percent of the federal poverty line, an option under the [...]

  U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer of New York wants to command the high seas with a “Cruise Ship Bill of Rights” that would force the cruise ship industry to adopt a plan that would “guarantee sanitary conditions, backup power and medical staff in case of emergencies. Schumer’s plan was revealed after at least three incidents [...]

Legislation to increase surveillance and deploy National Guard troops in schools, among other measures, could gain bipartisan approval in Congress – but only by sacrificing such education programs as financial literacy for students, Time.com reports. The school safety bill, introduced by Barbara Boxer of California, was originally going to spend $800 million on surveillance and [...]