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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mortality-black-belt/

Reporters often illuminate the problems of the U.S. health care system by looking to outliers, the least healthy places, such as the state of Mississippi or a parish in Louisiana. That makes sense; states and local governments are largely responsible for the education, insurance, hospitals and economics that drive health outcomes. But in the case of the Black Belt, those borders obscure the broader pattern: rural, Southern black Americans who live in communities founded on slavery routinely have some of the worst health outcomes in the country.

Some recent media coverage has focused on a disturbing rise in mortality among U.S. whites with a high-school education. A much-publicized series of papers by Anne Case and Angus Deaton showed that mortality for whites with a high school education or less is increasing and included a chart showing that it is now greater than mortality for blacks. The rise in mortality made headlines and is a concerning trend worthy of study, but the headlines obscured several important facts, chief among them that the chart showed mortality for all U.S. blacks, not only those who also have a high school education or less. After the authors were criticized for leaving blacks off a different chart in one of the papers, they told The Washington Post “the reason it’s not there — which we explain — is that black mortality is so high it doesn’t fit on the graph.”

In other words, the trends — an increase in mortality for some whites, a decrease for most blacks — are important, but so are the absolute differences, and blacks continue to die younger than people in other groups.

Medicaid expansion in Arkansas has really helped rural areas in the Mississippi Delta in my state compared to states in the region that didn't expand Medicaid
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