Mississippi’s health care system isn’t very good compared to other states’ health care systems, and new reports suggest that perhaps not everyone will be surprised, but the covid-19 pandemic can help change this trend. It didn’t happen.
In a report released last week by the Commonwealth Fund, 56 measurements were used to rank Mississippi’s healthcare system performance 51st among all states and Washington, DC. :
• Mississippi drug overdose deaths in 2020, the latest available figures, increased 55% year-on-year. This is the highest increase in any state. Not surprisingly, 69% of these overdose deaths were associated with some form of opioid, and 53% were associated with synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.
• Between February 2020 and April 2022, Mississippi had the highest mortality rate in the country, exceeding expected mortality rates. The state’s mortality displacement over the last 27 months was 596 per 100,000. With a population of 3 million, a total of 17,880 excess deaths.
According to the report, Mississippi had the highest mortality rate for two reasons. As expected, one was the coronavirus. The other is due to treatable medical problems, which may have increased as hospitals reduced non-dedicated medical care during the pandemic.
Other Mississippi Concerns:
• The state was ranked 48th in seven areas of covid-19 issues, including vaccination rates, hospitalizations, mortality rates, and health care stress.
• Mississippi ranked 47th for use in intensive care units. Mississippi Today reported that between August 2020 and March 2022, there were 323 days in which at least 80% of the ICU beds in the state were occupied.
• The state ranked 50th among the states of Kentucky and West Virginia for preventable cause deaths ranging from drug overdose to chronic medical conditions.
• Mississippi ranked 47th among adults without health insurance, at 17.4%.
The report has some recommendations for improving healthcare. Some are probably already established, such as developing a long-term pandemic strategy or having hospitals and other healthcare providers set up disaster response strategies. This is the most devised in the last two years.
As far as overdose is concerned, common sense recommendations are to increase access to addiction treatments and increase the availability of overdose reversals. The report does not mention avoiding addictive narcotics altogether, but that would be a logical starting point.
Part of Mississippi’s future performance depends on covid-19. If the mortality rate requiring hospitalization and the incidence of serious infections are reduced, it helps.
There is also the problem of increased drug overdose. The national rate in 2020 was 31% higher than the previous year, but Mississippi was the highest in the country at 55%. This is just one marker of the ongoing drug problem in our state.
The report does not specifically recommend expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, but states that the states with the highest percentage of uninsured adults have chosen not to expand.
We encourage increased investment in primary care, reduced financial barriers that prevent people from receiving treatment for chronic illnesses such as diabetes, and improved health care for pregnant women.
At the very least, these sound like a starting point for Republican leaders in states who don’t want to expand Medicaid.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
