In this multidisciplinary book, the editor and contributors provide the most accurate and most recent information on health and health care in the State of Mississippi. They explain why the state finds itself in precarious health conditions and reveal the prevailing circumstances as the state debates a path toward a comprehensive health care system for its citizens. They show who has had access to good health care in the state and celebrate the heroes who struggled to provide health care to all Mississippians, and contribute to the debate on how the health care system might be restructured, reconstructed, or adjusted to meet the needs of all people in the state, regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and national origin.

The issue of health disparities and socio-economic status leads to a relevant discussion of whether health and access to quality care are a right of all people, as the United Nations has proclaimed, or the privilege of a few who have the economic resources and the political clout to purchase first-rate care. The volume offers a clear understanding of health care trends in the state since the inception of its health system during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries up to the present and the prospects of transcending the obstacles of its own creation over the past two centuries. It likewise highlights the economic challenges that Mississippi, like other states, confronts; and how wise and realistic its priorities are in meeting the needs of its diverse populations, particularly racial and ethnic minorities.