Thinking Aloud About Poverty and Health in Rural Mississippi

Poverty and health status are interrelated, and their effects on each other are often bidirectional: poverty leads to poor health and poor health leads to poverty (1,2). In addition, life challenges associated with poverty, whether shortor long-term, create conditions that reduce household savings, lower learning ability, and reduce physical and emotional well-being (1), all of which endanger people’s health (1,2). Many Mississippians, especially the 51% who live in rural counties (3), experience poverty levels that are hard to imagine for most Americans. In particular, in recent years poor Mississippians faced heavy job losses in industries that once provided high wages and good benefits (4). These job losses led to decreases in annual income, increases in bankruptcies, and a declining number of people with health insurance (5). For example, from 2000 to 2003, median household incomes fell by $3,910 to $32,728, and the number of poor people increased by 38,000 to 456,000 (5). Regardless of location, poor people are more likely than affluent people to lack health insurance (6), so we can assume that many of the 19% of respondents to the Mississippi Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System who said they had no health insurance are poor (7).