Mississippi, Burned
The first year of the Affordable Care Act was, by almost every measure, an unmitigated disaster in Mississippi. In a state stricken by diabetes, heart disease, obesity and the highest mortality rate in the nation, President Barack Obama’s landmark health care law has barely registered, leaving the country’s poorest and most segregated state trapped in a severe and intractable health care crisis.
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In fact, it’s hard to find a list where Mississippi doesn’t rank last: Life expectancy. Per capita income. Children’s literacy. “Mississippi’s people do not fare well,” wrote Willie Morris, a seventh-generation native son who grew up in Yazoo City, once a bustling trading center perched on the southern edge of the cotton-rich Delta. Today, nearly half of Yazoo City’s residents live in poverty; its people, like the Delta’s vast swamps, have largely been drained away, along with the farming and factory jobs that used to support them. In a state with a population that is still half rural, signs of impoverishment are everywhere: irrepressible kudzu vines pressing into the glass door of an abandoned building; tipsy wooden shacks that look neglected and forlorn are instead occupied with life. “The Depression, in fact, was not a noticeable phenomenon in the poorest state in the Union,” Eudora Welty wrote of Mississippi in the 1930s. It remains the poorest state today.
None of which bodes well for health coverage in Mississippi. Small businesses that dominate the economy typically don’t offer health insurance, and Mississippi’s public health program for the poor is one of the most restrictive in the nation. Able-bodied adults without dependent children can’t sign up for Medicaid in Mississippi, no matter how little they earn, and only parents who earn less than 23 percent of the federal poverty level—some $384 a month for a family of three—can enroll. As a result, one in four adult Mississippians goes without health coverage. For African-Americans, the numbers are even worse: One in three adults is uninsured.
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Mississippi has the highest rate of leg amputations in America and one of the lowest rates of hemoglobin H1c testing, used to monitor and prevent diabetes complications. Amputations on African-Americans are even more startling: 4.41 per 1,000 Medicare enrollees versus 0.92 for non-blacks. The state also has high breast cancer death rates, even though it has low breast cancer incidence rates. The cancer often isn’t detected until it’s too late.
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