http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/mississippi-burned-obamacare-112181_full.html#.VFIUted8Fwn
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.
“There
are wide swaths of Mississippi where the Affordable Care Act is not a
reality,” Conner Reeves, who led Obamacare enrollment at the University
of Mississippi Medical Center, told me when we met in the state capital
of Jackson. Of the nearly 300,000 people who could have gained coverage in Mississippi in the first year of enrollment, just 61,494—some 20 percent—did so. When all was said and done, Mississippi would be the only state in the union where the percentage of uninsured residents has gone up, not down.
Why
has the law been such a flop in a state that had so much to gain from
it? When I traveled across Mississippi this summer, from Delta towns to
the Tennessee border to the Piney Woods to the Gulf Coast, what I found
was a series of cascading problems: bumbling errors and misinformation;
ignorance and disorganization; a haunting racial divide; and, above all,
the unyielding ideological imperative of conservative politics.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/mississippi-burned-obamacare-112181.html#ixzz3HdZRnTCM
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