Mississippi’s health care crisis is worsening as hospitals close and lawmakers continue to resist expanding Medicaid, the Mississippi State Medical Association warned.
Mississippi’s largest health insurance provider is finally covering patients at the state’s largest medical complex again after the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Mississippi announced an agreement.
The Centers for Disease Control is warning of the worst flu season in over a decade, with more than 78,000 hospitalizations and 4,500 deaths across the nation this year alone. Mississippi’s health system, already struggling with the damage from years of COVID-19, is feeling the consequences of the surge as well.
Disability Rights Mississippi, a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of those with disabilities throughout the state, has investigated complaints regarding the amount of time those on bond, like Brad Sellers, have waited for a forensic bed to open at Mississippi State Hospital.
The University of Mississippi Medical Center will not receive $50 million in American Rescue Act Plan funds that the Legislature had directed to go toward construction on patient-care facilities after Gov. Tate Reeves vetoed the appropriation.
Oresa Napper-Williams is the founder of Not Another Child, a nonprofit organization that she founded after her son, Andrell Daron Napper, was killed by gun violence in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 2007. One mission of her work is to ensure that parents who lost children to violence are treated with respect and dignity, and get the resources they need. She both collaborates with NYPD on violence prevention and is frank about problems within policing, including respect for Black community members.
The omicron surge has become severe enough, considering the latent damage to the state’s health-care system from nearly two years of pandemic care, that MSDH has restarted the mandatory rotation protocol that allows centralized diversion of high-severity cases.
Doctors are warning that the pandemic has broken Mississippi’s health-care system, and now as omicron washes over the state, doctors and nurses are exhausted and rushing to catch up.
Less than a week after Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves ended his COVID-19 State of Emergency order, the World Health Organization is warning that a new, potentially more dangerous strain of COVID-19 has emerged. In a statement yesterday, the WHO said South Africa first notified it of the variant, known as B.1.1..529 or the Omicron variant, on Nov. 24.
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