The South is ‘the epicenter’ of a new HIV crisis. Medicaid expansion could help.

If Mississippi alongside the other six southern states affected by the surge in HIV cases expanded Medicaid, the program would provide more federal funds for the poorest people, including making pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, more widely available, a daily pill that’s been touted as a game changer because it’s so effective at preventing HIV. The decision to not expand Medicaid, which is the nation’s largest public health insurance program for low-income people, in Mississippi as well as other parts of the South has become mixed with a stew of politics: red state versus blue state, urban versus rural, rich versus poor, straight versus gay and white versus everyone else.