Giving Compass' Take:
- Fred Clasen-Kelly and Renuka Rayasam draw attention to the work of a rural health clinic addressing racial health disparities in South Carolina's "Corridor of Shame."
- How can donors support rural health clinics in providing services and improving health outcomes for Black patients facing systemic barriers to care?
- Learn more about key issues in health and how you can help.
- Search our Guide to Good for nonprofits focused on health in your area.
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One morning in late April, a small brick rural health clinic along the Thurgood Marshall Highway bustled with patients.
There was Joshua McCray, 69, a public bus driver who, four years after catching COVID-19, still is too weak to drive.
Louvenia McKinney, 77, arrived complaining about shortness of breath.
Ponzella McClary brought her 83-year-old mother-in-law, Lula, who has memory issues and had recently taken a fall.
Morris Brown, the family practice physician who owns the rural health clinic, rotated through Black patients nearly every 20 minutes. Some struggled to walk. Others pulled oxygen tanks. And most carried three pill bottles or more for various chronic ailments.
But Brown called them “lucky,” with enough health insurance or money to see a doctor. The clinic serves patients along the infamous “Corridor of Shame,” a rural stretch of South Carolina with some of the worst health outcomes in the nation, underscoring the need for a rural health clinic to serve this marginalized population.
“There is a lot of hopelessness here,” Brown said. “I was trained to keep people healthy, but like 80% of the people don’t come see the doctor, because they can’t afford it. They’re just dying off.”
About 50 miles from the sandy beaches and golf courses along the coastline of this racially divided state, Morris’ independent practice serves the predominantly Black town of roughly 3,200 people. The area has stark rural health clinic and provider shortages and high rates of chronic disease, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease.
Such racial inequities are especially severe across the Southeast, home to most of the country’s Black population.
But South Carolina remains one of the few states where lawmakers refuse to expand Medicaid, despite research that shows it would provide medical insurance to hundreds of thousands of people and create thousands of health care jobs across the state in rural health clinics.
The decision means there will be more preventable deaths in the 17 poverty-stricken counties along Interstate 95 that comprise the Corridor of Shame, Brown said.
Read the full article about this South Carolina health clinic by Fred Clasen-Kelly and Renuka Rayasam at NPR.