Map of the Day: Access to Good Primary Care in America

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I’m playing around with GeoFRED again while we all wait for the next three or four shoes to drop on the Jeff Sessions show. Here’s an interesting map: the rate of preventable hospital admissions. This is based on the number of hospital admissions for “ambulatory care sensitive conditions,” such as diabetes, asthma, and hypertension, which normally doesn’t require hospitalization if patients are being treated by good primary care doctors. Essentially, then, this map shows the places where good primary care isn’t widely available or isn’t doing its job.

What makes it interesting is that it doesn’t map all that closely to poverty. From Kentucky down to Louisiana, you have lots of counties with high poverty and a poor access to good primary care. But north of that you have the same thing even though poverty is relatively low. Out west, you have the opposite: a fair amount of poverty, but pretty good access to primary care. So what’s going on?

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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