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KFF Health News covers the health issues facing people who live in America’s rural reaches.
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The "Silence in Sikeston" podcast explores what it means to live with racism and violence, then charts the toll on health — from hives and high blood pressure to struggles with mental health. The deaths of two Black men killed nearly 80 years apart in the same Missouri community anchor a conversation about the public health consequences of systemic bias.
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra has a plan to protect farmworkers from extreme heat and wildfire smoke, but farmworkers who pick California grapes say they need more, as climate change brings more extreme weather.
An increasing number of Americans struggle with energy poverty, the inability to adequately heat or cool one’s dwelling. Health officials and climate experts are sounding the alarm as record-breaking heat sweeps the nation.
State leaders are cutting public health spending and laying off workers hired during a pandemic-era grant boom. Public health officials say the bust will erode important advancements in the public health safety net, particularly in rural areas.
The Indian Health Service has a program that can pay for outside appointments when patients need care not offered at agency-funded sites. Critics say money shortages, complex rules, and administrative fumbles often block access, however.
UC-San Francisco is pausing its long-running master’s program in nurse-midwifery and plans to shift to a lengthier, costlier doctoral program. Midwives criticized the move and questioned the university’s motivations at a time of serious shortages of maternal care workers.
A Colorado picnic celebrated Farmworker Appreciation Day. But some dairy workers there said they aren’t feeling appreciated: They don’t have basic protective gear, even as bird flu spreads through area farms.
A collection agency sought court authority to garnish a patient’s wages to pay a disputed surgery bill. But after the patient showed up in court to argue the bill was bogus, the judge declined to let the bill collector seize her money.
Medical aid in death is legal in 10 states and the District of Columbia. But only Oregon and Vermont explicitly allow out-of-state people who are terminally ill to die with assistance there. So far, at least 49 people have made the trek while state legislation stalls elsewhere.
Political drama involving a rural Georgia county reflects how state regulations that govern when and where hospitals can be built or expanded are evolving.
“Certificate of need” laws, largely supported by the hospital industry, limit health facility construction in 35 states and Washington, D.C. Georgia lawmakers decided its law was complicating the reviving of two hospitals critical to their communities.
Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, was established to exclusively admit Black patients during a time when Jim Crow laws barred them from accessing the same health care facilities as white patients. Its closure underscores how hundreds of Black hospitals in the U.S. fell casualty to social progress.
KFF Health News and California Healthline staff took to the airwaves in the last couple of weeks to discuss maternal health care challenges in rural areas. Here’s a collection of their appearances.
Ten states have not expanded Medicaid, leaving 1.5 million people ineligible for the state and federal insurance program and also unable to afford private insurance. Seven of those states are in the South, where expansion efforts may have momentum but where lawmakers say political polarization is holding them back.
For rural patients, getting cancer treatment close to home has always been difficult. And now chemotherapy deserts are expanding across the United States as hospitals winnow services to save money, creating financial and logistical hurdles for people seeking lifesaving care.
For decades, state and federal agencies have restricted or delayed tribes and tribal epidemiology centers from accessing public health data, a blackout that leaves health workers in Native American communities cobbling together information to guide their work, including tracking devastating disease outbreaks.
Proposed regulations would require clinics providing abortions in the state to meet sweeping new health standards, despite a likely vote in November on a constitutional amendment to protect abortion access.
Dairy workers in Texas show signs of prior, uncounted bird flu infections in a new study. Without labor protection and better health care, cases are bound to quietly rise as the outbreak among livestock blazes in the United States.
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