meizitangzisu

On Oct. 30, people in Moral Movement Mississippi went to the gates from the Governor's Mansion to provide a letter to Gov. Phil Bryant, demanding that the act to grow Medicaid within the Imelda Perfect Slim state. The protesters did not talk to the governor; a Mississippi Capitol policeman accepted the letter on Bryant's behalf.

"We see a lot of Mississippians unable to live fulfilled lives due to poor health. People are crippled due to health crises that tear their lives apart, and by the responsibility of debt brought on by the inability to purchase the care they need," the letter states partly.

Demonstrators carried a large look for $8.7 billion that contained the signature of The president to represent the total amount the us government would contribute if Mississippi loosened Medicaid eligibility requirements. The state would need to spend just over $1 billion over the next six years to obtain the federal funds, according to some estimates.

This story appeared on Kaiser Health News.

The lunch rush at Tom's on Main in Yazoo City had come to a detailed, and also the waitresses, having cleared away plates of shrimp and cheese grits, seasoned turnip greens and pitchers of sweet tea, were retreating towards the counter to cash out and count their tips.

It didn't take long: The $6.95 lunchtime specials didn't land them much, and also the job certainly didn't include benefits like medical health insurance. For waitress Wylene Gary, 54, being uninsured was unnerving, but she didn't attempt to buy coverage by herself until the Affordable Care Act forced her to. She didn't wish to be a lawbreaker. Months earlier, she'd gone online to the federal government's new website, registered and paid her first monthly premium of $129. However when her new insurance card found its way to the mail, she was flabbergasted.

"It said, $6,000 deductible and 40 percent co-pay," Gary explained at the check-out counter, her timid drawl giving way to strident dismay. Confused, she called to speak with a representative for the insurer Magnolia Health. "'You tellin' me basically obtain a hospital bill for $100,000, I gotta pay $40,000?' And she or he said, 'Yes, ma'am.'"

Never mind the Magnolia worker was wrong --her out-of-pocket costs were legally limited to $6,350. Gary figured having a hospital bill that top, she would have to seek bankruptcy relief anyway. So really, she thought, what was the point?

"This ain't worth a tooth," she said.

She canceled her coverage.

The first year from the Affordable Care Act in Mississippi was, by nearly every measure, an unmitigated disaster. In a condition stricken by diabetes, heart disease, obesity and also the highest infant mortality rate in america, President Barack Obama's landmark healthcare law has barely registered, leaving the country's poorest and maybe most segregated state held in a severe and intractable healthcare crisis.

"There are wide swaths of Mississippi where the Affordable Care Act is not a reality," Conner Reeves, who led Obamacare enrollment for that University of Mississippi Medical Center, told me when we met in the state capital of Jackson. Of the nearly 300,000 individuals who could have bought coverage, 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, based on one analysis.

To patch together what had happened in Mississippi, I traveled there this summer. For six days, I went from Delta towns towards the Tennessee border towards the Piney Woods towards the Gulf Coast, and what I discovered would be a series of cascading problems: bumbling errors and misinformation ginned up through the law's tea party opponents; ignorance and disorganization; a haunting racial divide; and, most importantly, the unyielding ideological imperative of conservative politics. This, I discovered, was a story about the tea party and its influence over a state Republican Party in transition, in which a public feud between Gov. Phil Bryant and also the elected insurance commissioner, both Republicans who oppose Obamacare, forced the state to shut down its very own insurance marketplace, even as the Federal government in Washington refused to step into the fray. When the us government offered the necessary coverage on its balky healthcare.gov website, 70 % of Mississippians confessed they knew next to nothing about it. "We would talk to individuals who say, 'I do not want anything about Obamacare. I would like the Affordable Care Act,'" remembered Tineciaa Harris, among the so-called navigators educated to help Mississippians join medical health insurance. "And we'd have to show them that it is the same task."

Even the law's vaunted Medicaid expansion, designed to assist those too poor to qualify for subsidized private insurance, wasn't any help following the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could opt out. Gov. Bryant managed to get clear Mississippi wouldn't participate, leaving 138,000 residents, nearly all whom are black, without any insurance options whatsoever. Even though the politics of Obamacare became increasingly toxic, the state's already financially strapped rural hospitals confronted a brand Slim Xtreme new crisis from the law's failure to take hold: Facing massive losses in federal subsidies imposed by the law to see no increase in new Medicaid patients, hospitals let go staff and shuttered entire departments.

"We work hard at being last," snarked Roy Mitchell, the beleaguered executive director of the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program, concerning the state's many missteps.

Using the first year of open enrollment in it, Mississippi's small cadre of health advocates were feeling beaten down and betrayed by the Federal government and it is allies who, they suspect, viewed Mississippi as a lost cause and had directed their efforts elsewhere.

"Even a dog knows the main difference between being tripped over and being kicked," Mitchell added.