LAMAR – Kimberly Todd sat in a brown and gold upholstered chair on her front porch at the end of a long dirt driveway on a cloudy September afternoon. Wearing jeans and a crimson blouse, it’s the most dressed up she’s been in months, she says.

Tight clothing, socks and shoes make her skin feel like it’s on fire – a symptom of fibromyalgia she has lived with for four years without health insurance. A single mother of five, Todd also has endured numbness in her abdomen, pain in her uterus and two periods a month as a result of complications from a C-section in 2021.

Todd qualifies for Medicaid, but the difficulty she has faced getting on the program over the last few months reveals the cracks poor people fall through when trying to get assistance from the social programs that purportedly e

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