'New Federalism' in the Delta
Huttie, Wayne Clark and Joseph Jr.
HEALTH CARE FOR ALL 'New Federalism' in the Delta WAYNE CLARK and JOSEPH HUTTIE, JR. Mound Bayou, Mississippi Leonard King is not sure who Richard Nixon is. To a black plantation worker...
...counseling...
...Most of the medical assistance has been provided free to indigent black families, whose average annual income is less than $1,000...
...King, as the sole supporter of a family of sixteen, earns less than $1,000 a year...
...For this reason, and because they have operated independently of local medical establishments, the centers have come in open conflict with health professionals as well as with state and local officials...
...Her eye drops cost $4 a bottle, and each treatment costs $35, but Mound Bayou pays for all that now...
...The Mound Bayou Hospital and Health Center Wayne Clark is on the staff of the Southern Regional Council's Governmental Monitoring Project...
...HEALTH CARE FOR ALL 'New Federalism' in the Delta WAYNE CLARK and JOSEPH HUTTIE, JR...
...However, these programs and a half-dozen others have been terminated, and the future of the hospital and health center is uncertain...
...Thus, the impact of the New Federalism is being felt in an intense way in Mound Bayou...
...Pearlie Johnson is a white woman who supports two young daughters on an annual income of $1,500...
...Individuals are treated at the centers by a team of medical specialists that usually includes an internist, dentist, pediatrician, social worker, and nurse...
...The decline coincided almost exactly with the extension of the Mound Bayou Hospital services to residents of Coahoma County...
...The new wing will add thirty-four beds to the hospital's total, which is four less than the county will lose if the Mound Bayou Community Hospital shuts down...
...Where services are least accessible the need is greatest...
...Seven years ago she developed cataracts which threatened her eyesight...
...An HEW study in 1967 revealed that persons with family income of less than $2,000 a year had roughly four times as many chronic health problems as did those with family incomes of $7,000 or more...
...Under OEO, the operation had an annual budget of $60,000...
...What they are sure of is that until the family came under the outreach program of the Mound Bayou Comprehensive Health Center, there was seldom enough food for more than one meal a day and most of the younger children were constantly ill...
...Last October they voted to provide Mound Bayou's Health Center with $10,000 in revenue sharing funds to salvage the facility's emergency food distribution program...
...Unfortunately, the county hospital treats few indigent patients...
...Since its inception in 1965, the Mound Bayou Community Hospital and Health Center in Bolivar County has treated some 20,000 patients a year for a variety of illnesses...
...Surgery, paid for by the Health Center at Mound Bayou, saved her sight...
...They have served as a focal point for citizen action on a number of health-related issues...
...dental care...
...The majority are not even eligible for Medicaid...
...As a step toward meeting the problem, the Johnson Administration, under the Comprehensive Health Service Program, established comprehensive health centers throughout the nation...
...serves the residents of four Delta counties—Bolivar, Sunflower, Coahoma, and Washington...
...Within two years, the out-patient health clinic will be forced to dismantle...
...The construction will be financed by a $1.5 million county bond issue, an $800,000 Hill-Burton grant, and $100,000 in Federal revenue sharing funds...
...The Mound Bayou Hospital and Health Center, and others like it, are meeting the basic health and medical needs of the people they serve...
...If that should stop, well, Pearlie Johnson says she tries not to think about that happening, but her voice breaks just a bit and she stops talking...
...To a black plantation worker who has spent most of his fifty-six years fighting a losing struggle against the ravaging poverty and disease of Mississippi's northwest Delta, the President and his office have little immediate significance...
...Rather, care must include such services as free medicine, X-rays, and laboratory tests...
...The high cost of private treatment, in conjunction with the sharp increases in overall medical costs, has forced a growing number of the poor to regard basic health care services as luxuries they cannot afford...
...Most of the community-level education and environmental program aimed at eradicating unsanitary conditions causing disease has been terminated...
...With the reduction of OEO programs in the spring of 1973, the Mound Bayou program was shuffled into the bureaucracy of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare...
...Danny Mitchell, a veteran civil rights organizer in Mound Bayou, views New Federalism as simply a new form of racism: "Basically, we're talking about a shift from black to white control...
...A few weeks after HEW announced that it was terminating funding for the Mound Bayou Community Hospital, the South Delta Health Planning Council, part of Governor Waller's Comprehensive Health Department, reported that it had applied for and was reasonably certain of receiving a grant of $105,000 from HEW...
...She didn't bother to go to the local hospital or to a town physician because, as she puts it, "Town doctors here in Gunnison, well, they don't take up with us poor folks...
...His book, "America, We Are Still Here," will be published later this year...
...If the comprehensive health care centers can be saved from destruction by the New Federalism, they can continue to provide a proven alternative to a system of health care that has failed and is failing the poor...
...Mortality rates from influenza and pneumonia among the black population of Bolivar County dropped from 51.0 in 1966 to 29.4 in 1970...
...In contrast to the meager amount allocated to Mound Bayou, the Bolivar supervisors recently voted to add a $2.4 million wing to the county hospital...
...At its peak, in addition to providing regular medical services, the complex administered a dozen grass-roots health care programs, including home nursing, health education, youth guidance and drug abuse, meals for the aged, social outreach, supplemental food distribution, and environmental health care...
...The $10,000 grant allowed the program to be phased out more gracefully, but it demonstrated that revenue sharing, at least as it operates in Mississippi, is not a feasible alternative to direct Federal support...
...Since then, a series of HEW decisions has stripped the health complex of forty per cent of its staff and fifty per cent of its medical capabilities...
...A crisis in health care is not a novel situation for rural Mississippians or for most of the South's other indigents...
...Joseph Huttie, Jr...
...Controversy has surrounded the centers since they began operation...
...child care...
...Coahoma County's infant mortality rate showed a sharp decline from 65.1 per 1,000 live births in 1966 to 36.9 in 1970...
...And in Mississippi, white control means white racism...
...Three of the six counties are part of the area covered by Mound Bayou...
...Here in Bolivar County it means that the entire nature of things for black people will change, and the change sure as hell won't be for the better...
...If the policies of the Nixon Administration's New Federalism prevail, by this spring there will be no in-patient hospital at Mound Bayou offering free medical care to indigent patients...
...HEW annual funding dropped from $5.5 million in 1972 to $3.3 million in 1973, and will drop even further this spring...
...Poor people consistently have more frequent and serious illnesses than do members of the middle and upper classes...
...Willie Dixon, a black social worker who has been with the Mound Bayou Center since it opened in 1965, referred her to an eye specialist...
...In 1972-1973, Mississippi Governor William Waller vetoed Office of Economic Opportunity grants for the Community Hospital and the Health Center at Mound Bayou...
...A more recent survey concluded that the situation had changed little in the past five years...
...In a region where more than ten million people live at or below Federally defined poverty levels, the unavoidable conclusion is that too many Southerners are suffering from the combined effects of poverty and ill health...
...Some forty-seven counties in the eleven Southern states have neither practicing physicians nor health care facilities...
...Although the OEO reversed Waller's rulings, black leadership in the state generally regarded the vetoes as attempts to gain control of the centers...
...Of the eleven states in the Old South, only North Carolina and Virginia provide Medicaid to certain poor persons who do not qualify for public assistance...
...is former program director of World Press Institute...
...His daughters' welfare checks bring the family income to about $3,000— the Kings aren't certain how much...
...Even in localities where doctors and facilities are available, the poor, more often than not, simply cannot pay for and thus do not receive adequate medical attention...
...If current Administration policies prevail, within two years 86,000 poor people will be without dependable out-patient medical care...
...Federal cutbacks have already decreased Mound Bayou's medical capabilities...
...Bolivar County's five supervisors control almost $1.5 million in revenue sharing monies...
...The practical effects have been to neutralize recent black economic gains while strengthening the political and economic domination of local whites...
...free transportation to the centers, and an overall effort to improve the environmental conditions of the poor...
...The funds would be used to "organize for the purpose of seeking reasonable means of improving health conditions" in six Mississippi Delta counties...
...It has already cost this town of 2,000 some 150 jobs at the health complex, and much of its hope for the future...
...Since they had a significantly higher incidence of heart ailments and mental and nervous disorders, their physical activity was restricted more than twice as often as that of the non-poor...
...The centers operate on the theory that primary medical and clinical care alone is not sufficient substantially to improve the health of the poor...
Vol. 38 • April 1974 • No. 4
