Montana Examines Ways To Ease Health Care Workforce Shortages
Bills before the legislature would license community health workers and make it easier for some other health professionals licensed in other states to do business in Montana.
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Bills before the legislature would license community health workers and make it easier for some other health professionals licensed in other states to do business in Montana.
In a rural, largely Republican region of California, homegrown efforts to bolster the medical workforce face an uphill battle, in part because of federal health care cuts approved by the GOP Congress and signed by President Donald Trump in July, as well as a state budget deficit.
The Trump administration defunded the National Institutes of Health’s MOSAIC grant program, which launched the careers of scientists from diverse backgrounds.
An estimated 4 million Americans will lose health insurance over the next decade if Congress doesn’t extend enhanced subsidies for Affordable Care Act marketplace coverage, which expire at the end of the year. Florida and Texas would see the biggest losses, in part because they have not expanded Medicaid eligibility.
In their zeal to “Make America Healthy Again,” top Trump administration officials depict patients and the doctors who treat them as partly responsible for whatever ails them.
Health systems drop out of Medicare Advantage plans all the time. Yet government documents obtained by KFF Health News show that federal regulators rarely warn plans that their networks of health providers are so skimpy they violate legal requirements.
The Indian Health Service was mostly spared in the federal government’s widespread staffing cuts, but tribal governments and organizations have lost funding elsewhere in the melee of federal health agency cuts.
The Senate has yet to confirm a Health and Human Services secretary, but things around the department continue to change at a breakneck pace to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive orders. Payment systems have been shut down, webpages and entire datasets have been taken offline, and workers — including those with civil service protections — have been urged to quit or threatened with layoffs. Meanwhile, foreign and trade policy changes are also affecting health policy. Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico and Lauren Weber of The Washington Post join KFF Health News’ Julie Rovner to discuss these stories and more. Also this week, Rovner interviews KFF Health News’ Julie Appleby, who reported the latest “Bill of the Month” feature, about a young woman, a grandfathered health plan, and a $14,000 IUD.
Millions of Americans suffer from temporomandibular joint, or TMJ, disorders. The high cost and poor insurance coverage of TMJ care can bury patients in debt even as the treatments do more harm than good.
The Trump administration has paused implementation of a rule limiting miners’ exposure to airborne silica dust days after a federal court agreed to put it on hold to hear an industry challenge. The protections are meant to head off a surge in cases of black lung disease. Meanwhile, any enforcement of new standards might be meager due to workforce cuts.
The National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, is one of only a few dozen research facilities of its type. The threat of staffing and grant cuts has town leaders worried and has added to long-standing tension around the lab’s presence in this politically conservative region.
Rosa María Carranza has worked and paid taxes for more than two decades, but a provision in the GOP's One Big Beautiful Bill Act will make her and an estimated 100,000 other lawfully present immigrant seniors ineligible for Medicare. Now Carranza’s once secure retirement is in question.
Patients seeking mental health care are more likely to be on Medicaid than patients in more profitable areas of care, such as cancer or cardiac treatment.
Advocates say it is discrimination and are arguing for “insurance fairness” on the grounds that people who have joints surgically replaced typically don’t face the same kinds of coverage challenges.
Like local jails nationwide, Montana’s small holding facilities have become institutions of last resort as patients in mental health crisis stall in backlogs, waiting for beds at the state-run mental hospital.
About 8% of Americans lacked health insurance in 2023, the Census Bureau announced. But its report doesn’t capture the effect of states winnowing their Medicaid rolls by millions of people since the pandemic emergency ended.
In his first term, President Donald Trump granted pardons or clemency to more than 60 convicted fraudsters, including health care executives who defrauded Medicare out of hundreds of millions of dollars, courts and juries found. Now, Trump says cracking down on fraud is a priority.
Aging alone, without a spouse, a partner, or children, requires careful planning. New programs for this growing population offer much-needed help.
A federal program that helped pay for more than 23 million low-income households’ internet access runs out of money soon. The end of the subsidy launched earlier in the pandemic could have profound impacts on health care access.
More than 100 rural hospitals have stopped delivering babies since 2021, including a South Dakota hospital that serves small towns, farming communities, and a Native American reservation. Patients there now travel at least an hour to give birth.
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