The Mississippi Legislature is gaveling back in at the state Capitol on Wednesday at 1 p.m. for the official last day of the 2026 legislative session.
The House and Senate are set to return to their respective chambers to handle business that afternoon. In late March, both bodies agreed to reconvene on April 15 and adjourn the session sine die that day. Lawmakers went home on Friday, April 3, planning to return on April 15 unless House Speaker Jason White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann decided against it.
The Legislature’s website has not released official agendas for what business lawmakers would take up on Wednesday. But the two chambers could take up a pharmacy benefit manager reform bill if the lawmakers working on the bill agree to finalize the legislation, White said on the House floor on April 2.
“There is major work going on behind the scenes. The governor and his staff have been helpful in that regard, in bringing the parties, continuing to bring them back to the table,” he said. “And I would not rule out us being back here in the coming days for a day or two to deal with this matter if we could find compromise and agreement among the parties.”
Pharmacy benefit managers are the middlemen between pharmacists, drug companies and insurance plans. They help decide what drugs insurance covers and how much pharmacies get paid. House Bill 1665’s original language introduced regulations to how PBMs may negotiate the amount of money a person’s insurance will pay for prescription medicine.
The Senate added an amendment that included an $11 dispensing fee per prescription filed, which the House rejected outright. As a result, the bill died on a deadline day, White said in a March 26 social media post.
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann told the Mississippi Free Press on April 3 he “would love to come to an agreement on the PBM bill.” Hosemann, White and the conferees from the House and the Senate working on H.B. 1665 have met in Hosemann’s office “multiple times” without coming to an agreement, he said, likening the disagreements to the Hatfields and the McCoys.
While “prescriptions are too expensive,” he said PBMs “have a legitimate reason that they don’t want to have the government tell them exactly how much they have to pay for something when they can negotiate it.”
“Those two conflicting things have yet to be resolved. I’m hopeful,” Hosemann told the Mississippi Free Press. “We don’t need to raise the health care cost for anybody and it seems like my two friends are fighting over something that really, they should be looking at somebody else on”
The Legislature could also review vetoes from Gov. Tate Reeves and decide to override them on Wednesday. Changes to the medical-cannabis program and Rural Health Transformation Fund are among six other bills the governor has vetoed thus far. Vetoes require a two-thirds majority from both the House and the Senate.
