"Wrong Way" Missouri
subscribeSt. Louis Post-Dispatch
One July morning in 1938, pilot Douglas Corrigan took off from New York on his way to California. He landed 28 hours and 13 minutes later in Dublin, Ireland. History has labeled him "Wrong Way" Corrigan.
If Corrigan had been directing health care, his plane could have been called the State of Missouri.
New U.S. Census Bureau numbers released Tuesday showed that the number of uninsured people in Missouri increased a staggering 15.4 percent from 2005 to 2006, from 668,146 to 771,682. Nationally, the number of people lacking health insurance increased by only 5 percent, to 47 million.
Why is Missouri headed the wrong way at a much faster rate than the rest of the country? In his analysis of the census data, Professor Timothy D. McBride, who heads the Center for Health Policy Analysis at St. Louis University's School of Public Health, said that the large decline in the number of people covered by Medicaid was "the biggest change in Missouri's insurance coverage from 2005 to 2006."