Sarah Varney, reporting from Mississippi for Politico Magazine: Why has the [Affordable Care Act] 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. 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 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 care. And we’d have to explain to them that it’s the same thing.”
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 14:04:12 +0000
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