This is a complicated crisis, but what baffles me is that the local corporate media make so little of this. They hardly mention it, and they never suggest that Gov. Haley Barbour's program for running state government has anything to do with our decline. Or rather, they never mentioned it until recently. I know The Clarion-Ledger has already declared a victor, but wouldn't it be better to have a real debate, where the candidates truly answer?
Consider this:
For decades, Mississippi and neighboring states with large black populations and expanses of enduring poverty made steady progress in reducing infant death. But, in what health experts call an ominous portent, progress has stalled and in recent years the death rate has risen in Mississippi and several other states.
The toll is visible in Hollandale, a tired town in the impoverished Delta region of northwest Mississippi.
Jamekia Brown, 22 and two months pregnant with her third child, lives next to the black people's cemetery in the part of town called No Name, where multiple generations crowd into cheap clapboard houses and trailers.
So it took only a minute to walk to the graves of Ms. Brown's first two children, marked with temporary metal signs because she cannot afford tombstones. …
"If you didn't have a car and had to go 60 miles to see a doctor, would you go very often?" said Ramona Beardain, director of Delta Health Partners. The group runs a federally financed program, Healthy Start, that sends social workers and nurses to counsel pregnant teenagers and new mothers in seven counties of the Delta. "If they're in school they miss the day; if they're working they don't get paid," Ms. Berdain said.
Poverty has climbed in Mississippi in recent years, and things are tougher in other ways for poor women, with cuts in cash welfare and changes in the medical safety net. …
In 2004, Gov. Haley Barbour came to office promising not to raise taxes and to cut Medicaid. Face-to-face meetings were required for annual re-enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP, the children's health insurance program; locations and hours for enrollment changed, and documentation requirements became more stringent.
As a result, the number of non-elderly people, mainly children, covered by the Medicaid and CHIP programs declined by 54,000 in the 2005 and 2006 fiscal years. …
One former Medicaid official, Maria Morris, who resigned last year as head of an office that informed the public about eligibility, said that under the Barbour administration, her program was severely curtailed.
"The philosophy was to reduce the rolls and our activities were contrary to that policy," she said.
Mississippi's Medicaid director, Dr. Robert L. Robinson, said in a written response that suggesting any correlation between the decline in Medicaid enrollment and infant mortality was "pure conjecture."
Dr. Robinson said that the new procedures eliminated unqualified recipients. With 95 enrollment sites available, he said, no one should have had difficulty signing up.
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