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With legislators seemingly deadlocked on Medicaid expansion in Florida, residents in the “coverage gap” are stitching together their medical care through personal ingenuity, half doses of medicines and low-cost clinics. It’s exhausting work, especially when you’re sick.
Without Medicaid expansion, South Florida’s low-income residents have found out the hard way that the healthcare safety net designed to catch people before they hit bottom is no substitute for insurance.
Why won’t Florida adopt Medicaid expansion? The Florida Senate has proposed a plan, but House leaders and Gov. Rick Scott oppose any Medicaid expansion because they say they don’t trust the federal government to keep its promise to pay for covering more Floridians.
Oxnard and surrounding Ventura County grow more than 630 million pounds of strawberries a year. The pesticides that growers depend on—a revolving roster of caustic and highly volatile chemicals called fumigants—are among the most toxic used in agriculture.
They were building the young man’s coffin in the front yard when we arrived. The men worked steadily and quietly in a manner that suggested front-yard coffin construction was a routine task. I soon learned that it was.
In Georgia, parents of developmentally disabled children fear what might happen should the state go ahead with plans to put more patients in community placements. In 2014, a total of 498 patients died in community care, making the total nearly 1,000 deaths in two years.
Cornelius James Evans had just turned 18 when he died, before his mother could establish formal legal guardianship, and the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities is now using that to deny her a copy of its investigation into his death.
The state has not put a good system in place to support developmentally disabled patients moved from state facilities into community care, and it’s unclear if it is following recommendations to better investigate patient deaths, according to an independent monitor.
Joaqlin Estus produced this story while participating in The California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, a program of USC's Annenberg School of Journalism. It was originally published by Alaska Public Radio.
