Delores Lowery remembers vividly the day in 2016 when she was working in a weaving plant near her home in Bennettsville, South Carolina, and the world around her seemed to go dim.
She turned to her co-workers. “And I asked, I said, ‘Why y’all got it so dark in here? They said, ‘Delores, it’s not dark in here.’ I said, ‘Yes, it is. It’s so dark in here.’”
She landed in the hospital. Her A1C level, which shows the average percentage of sugar in someone’s blood over the past few months, was 14%.
A reading of 6.5% or higher indicates diabetes.
Lowery’s home in Marlboro County is at the heart of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls the “Diabetes Belt” — 644 mostly Southern counties where rates of the disease are high.
And of those counties, NPR found that more than half have high levels of medical debt. That means at least 1 in 5 people have medical debt in collections.
That’s much higher than the national rate, which is 13%, according to the Urban Institute, a social-policy nonprofit. In Marlboro County, 37% of people have medical debt in collections.
NPR measured the overlap of Diabetes Belt counties and high medical debt counties by merg …
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Delores Lowery remembers vividly the day in 2016 when she was working in a weaving plant near her home in Bennettsville, South Carolina, and the world around her seemed to go dim.
She turned to her co-workers. “And I asked, I said, ‘Why y’all got it so dark in here? They said, ‘Delores, it’s not dark in here.’ I said, ‘Yes, it is. It’s so dark in here.’”
She landed in the hospital. Her A1C level, which shows the average percentage of sugar in someone’s blood over the past few months, was 14%.
A reading of 6.5% or higher indicates diabetes.
Lowery’s home in Marlboro County is at the heart of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls the “Diabetes Belt” — 644 mostly Southern counties where rates of the disease are high.
And of those counties, NPR found that more than half have high levels of medical debt. That means at least 1 in 5 people have medical debt in collections.
That’s much higher than the national rate, which is 13%, according to the Urban Institute, a social-policy nonprofit. In Marlboro County, 37% of people have medical debt in collections.
NPR measured the overlap of Diabetes Belt counties and high medical debt counties by merg …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]