The Goat Pen

Bklyn wrote:How the country's most unhealthy state turned out to be the lowest adopter of the Affordable Care Act...

The first year of the Affordable Care Act in Mississippi was, by almost every measure, an unmitigated disaster. In a state stricken by diabetes, heart disease, obesity and the highest infant-mortality rate in the nation, President Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare law has barely registered, leaving the country’s poorest and perhaps most segregated state trapped in a severe and intractable healthcare crisis.

To piece together what had happened in Mississippi, I traveled there this summer. For six days, I went from Delta towns to the Tennessee border to the Piney Woods to the Gulf Coast, and what I found was a series of cascading problems: bumbling errors and misinformation ginned up by the law’s tea-party opponents; ignorance and disorganization; a haunting racial divide; and, above all, the unyielding ideological imperative of conservative politics. This, I found, was a story about the Tea Party and its influence over a state Republican Party in transition, where a public feud between Governor Phil Bryant and the elected insurance commissioner, both Republicans who oppose Obamacare, forced the state to shut down its own insurance marketplace, even as the Obama administration in Washington refused to step into the fray. By the time the federal government offered the required coverage on its balky Healthcare.gov website, 70 percent of Mississippians confessed they knew almost nothing about it. “We would talk to people who say, ‘I don’t want anything about Obamacare. I want the Affordable Care Act,’” remembered Tineciaa Harris, one of the so-called navigators trained to help Mississippians sign up for health insurance. “And we’d have to explain to them that it’s the same thing.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... pi/382313/

bluetick wrote: Jesus, what a depressing article. Mississippi is helpless...and hopeless.

Many of Lewis’ friends and customers didn’t earn enough to buy insurance on the federal exchange as he did – they fell into the Medicaid gap. “I know guys who wash cars every day, and it’s hot,” he explained. “They fall down and have a stroke or somethin’, they don’t have any health insurance. And where’s the money gonna come from? His family is depending on him.” Lewis had followed the news about Bryant’s opposition to the Medicaid expansion. To him, it made sense that white conservatives wouldn’t want people like him—blacks—to have Medicaid; people in Mississippi have learned to deal with bigotry. But it surprised him that Republicans in the state were leaving white people in the Medicaid gap, too. “As long as you don’t step on my shoes, and I don’t step on yours, man, we can live and coincide,” he said. “But when you’re white and do that to other white people? Man, that’s mean-spirited.”

hedge wrote:This is one of the stories on the main yahoo page. Nice pic...

Obama picks NY prosecutor Lynch to be next attorney general

BigRedMan wrote:IB is right.

Bitches need to loosen up.

eCat wrote: I guess a white guy wasn't qualified

eCat wrote:yea, I think we've realized that for whatever reason, innovation is missing in the Chinese culture - clearly that is not the case with Japan.