Mississippi continues to have among the nation’s highest rates of poverty, income inequality and people lacking insurance as well as the lowest household incomes, new data from the federal government show.
The latest release of U.S. Census information, published Thursday, shows that 20.8 percent of Mississippians are in poverty, based on a three-year average between 2014 and 2016—the most in the U.S.
Although the state saw poverty dip slightly since 2014, Mississippi’s three-year poverty rate is one of only two states where more than 20 percent of the population are in poverty; the other is neighboring Louisiana, at 20.6 percent.
Mississippi also ranks highest for what the Census calls proximity to or depth of poverty.
Nationally, the poverty rate has declined for three consecutive years, standing now at 14 percent.
According to the data, Mississippi also has the nation’s lowest median household income, of $41,754 annually. In addition to having the lowest median income of its neighboring states, Mississippi is just one of three states—along with Arkansas and West Virginia—where median yearly income is below $45,000.
Maryland has the highest annual median income, of $78,945 while the national median income is $57,617.
The Census also looked at numbers of people who lack health insurance. Mississippi’s rate of 11.8 percent is among the bottom ten states, and the highest in its region.
Utah has the most people without health insurance (16.6 percent) while Massachusetts has the highest portion of citizens who have health-care insurance.
Census numbers also note that of the 10 states with the highest percentages of uninsured, only Nevada had expanded Medicaid as of January 2016. Louisiana expanded the program, which the federal Affordable Care Act permits, later that year.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.