Category: Health
-
Elections really do have consequences
Pregnant women in Franklin County and neighboring areas of northeast Georgia can no longer deliver babies at St. Mary’s Sacred Heart Hospital just outside Lavonia. But Georgians and, indeed, all Americans now have the privilege of being able to buy gun silencers without having to pony up a $200 tax. How, you might wonder, are…
-
Rural Georgia voters apparently believed Trump wouldn’t cut Medicaid. Oops.
I was motivated by a couple of things when I started working on “Trouble in God’s Country” more than a decade ago. The first was that I was convinced by research I was conducting that the socioeconomic divide between Georgia’s haves and have-nots was bigger than generally understood and getting worse year after year after…
-
CDC and AJC confirm what TIGC has been telling you for years: rural Georgians are dying younger than their urban cousins
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution led Wednesday morning’s print edition with a story headlined “Georgians in rural areas more likely to die early.” The story was based on a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). I’m glad to see my long-ago employer covering this issue, but it’s not exactly like this…
-
More than half of Georgia’s counties in bottom national quartile for health outcomes
One of the things I’ve been working on lately is a piece ranking all 159 Georgia counties nationally on a range of socioeconomic measures. The last chunk of data I needed was the 2024 release from County Health Rankings & Roadmaps (CHRR). That report hit the web on March 24th, and I’ve decided it merits…
-
New record of 123 Georgia counties reported more deaths than births in 2021; statewide gap between births and deaths narrowest on record
The number of Georgia counties recording more deaths than births jumped again in 2021, due largely to a rising death toll that owed primarily to a combination of Covid-19 fatalities and lethal drug overdoses, according to data published Friday by the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH). The total number of Georgia’s 159 counties reporting…
-
KFF’s national analysis matches TIGC’s Georgia findings on the Red-Blue Covid-19 divide
Research spotlighting the differences in how Red and Blue America are responding to virtually every aspect of Covid-19 continues to pile up: the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) went up yesterday with a report declaring that its polling had found “that political partisanship is a stronger national predictor of vaccination than other demographic factors.” I haven’t…
-
Gauging the Gap between Metro Atlanta and the rest of the state on premature death rates
I’ve spent a good part of the summer taking a deep dive into several pots of economic and education data with an eye toward fleshing out a couple of chapters in the book version of TIGC. As a result, I’ve been neglecting the blog. Then, in mid-August, I got a call asking me to make…
-
Rural Georgia never recovered from the Great Recession. Now comes COVID-19
There’s a persistent pattern I’ve noticed in various buckets of economic, population, and education data, but I’ve never fully connected the dots or taken a stab at suggesting what it all might mean. Now seems like a good time to do that. Rural Georgia — and especially Middle and South Georgia — got the crap…
-
Covid-19 may stir a perfect storm for rural Georgia
When I began work on this project some years back and came up with the title “Trouble in God’s Country,” I was thinking about things like the urban-rural divide in economics, education, healthcare, and politics. It never crossed my mind that a new plague might come along that would stir up what might be a…