LEFT
OUT
thought a change of scenery might
help her transcend her grief. There,
she worked in a department store.
But after a year, Johnson’s
mother persuaded her to return
to Louisiana in the hopes that she
would resume her studies. She
came home but could not find the
motivation to return to classes.
Instead, she took a job as a dietician at a nursing home, planning
the meals, earning about $1,000 a
month, she says.
“I just didn’t want to go back to
school,” she said. “It was the beginning of a downward spiral. I feel
like I should have gone back to college and my life would be better.”
Over the subsequent decades,
Johnson attended to elderly people
in nursing homes and in private
residences, delivering meals and
medication, emptying bedpans and
changing seats.
Most of those jobs paid
minimum wage. None included
health insurance.
“It didn’t bother me,” she said,
“because I never was sick.”
But as the years passed, the minor ailments to which a person can
grow accustomed burgeoned into
life-threatening conditions. Her
feet and ankles swelled, and so did
her face, in what her doctors would
HUFFINGTON
02.03.13
later conclude was a likely manifestation of thyroid problems. Her
left side felt increasingly heavy.
Even as pain and worry became
constant, she did not consult a
doctor for two simple reasons: She
didn’t have health insurance, and
she didn’t have money.
At her last job before she collapsed, she was bringing home
about $400 every other week, she
says. The rent on her brick-faced
“MEDICAID IS A SYSTEM OF INFLEXIBLE
MANDATES, ONE-SIZE FITS-ALL
REQUIREMENTS AND WASTEFUL,
BUREAUCRATIC INEFFICIENCIES.”
apartment on the edges of town
ran $575 a week. Her utilities absorbed another $300 a month.
“I just lived paycheck to paycheck,” she said. “How you going to
go to the doctor with no money?”
In her town in northern Louisiana, Johnson did not lack for
company. Nurtured more than a
century ago by cotton farming,
Ruston is home today to some
22,000 people — more than a
third of them living at or below
poverty, according to census data.
Its compact downtown is dotted
by markers of inadequate finance,
from the payday lenders and pawn
shops that dominate the strip