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Rural MAHA Followers Say Trump Health Policies Haven’t Reached Their Communities

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 10:01:00 +0000

About half of rural voters identify with , a sprawling political movement championed by the Trump administration, but most said President Donald Trump’s healthcare policies have not benefited their communities, according to a from The Associated Press in partnership with KFF.

About 8 in 10 rural voters — an important voting bloc for Trump and fellow Republicans in recent elections — said the Trump administration’s policies have had a negative effect or no impact on the health of people where they live. Most MAHA supporters, 68%, also feel this way, according to the national survey of more than 2,000 rural registered voters.

The findings signal an apparent disconnect between the Trump administration’s MAHA-branded policy priorities and rural America’s perception of their reach and effectiveness.

Iowa pastor Mike Jager, 58, is a registered Republican and considers himself part of the MAHA movement. The Trump administration’s health policies have had “minimal” impact on the health of his community, Jager said, but he added that Trump’s health secretary, , is moving the needle “in the right direction.”

“It’s a beginning,” Jager said. “It’s a big ship to try and turn around and course-correct.”

Kennedy has used the MAHA label to support various agendas, including , , and investing in regenerative agriculture.

Jager lives in Sumner, Iowa, “less than a quarter mile from where the corn ends and the city begins.” He’s seen family members and neighbors develop diseases that he believes resulted in part from exposure to agricultural chemicals and consumption of unhealthy, processed foods.

In the June Republican primary for governor, Jager voted for Zach Lahn, a businessman and farmer, who ran on a MAHA platform and beat out Trump-backed U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra. He plans to vote for him again in November.

Jager said that President Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is moving the needle “in the right direction.” (Miriam Alarcón Avila for ��ýҕ�l Health News)

Many Rural Voters Are Prioritizing Health Issues

About two-thirds of rural voters who support MAHA said it’s “extremely” or “very” important to them to vote for a candidate who does, too, while only 4 in 10 rural voters overall said the same.

Trump sought to seize on MAHA support during his campaign for another term two years ago. Now, amid tight midterm races, Kennedy has campaigned to galvanize the movement’s support. In May, he attended a MAHA bill signing with Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, and in August, he went fishing with Lahn, posting about it on social media.

Yet the survey indicates voters are noticing “this weird split in the Trump administration” between what Kennedy messages and what Trump says and does, said David Peterson, a political science professor at Iowa State University.

“It’s this mix of things coming out of D.C., out of different pieces of the administration, that’s confusing people,” Peterson said.

In Iowa, concerns about what’s causing are “a big deal,” he said. For many people who identify with MAHA, being healthy includes taking on corporate agriculture and pharmaceutical companies that they think cause cancer, he added.

“The sort of populist messaging around that is appealing right now,” Peterson said.

In the poll, views on healthcare access and costs largely diverged along party lines. Most Democratic and independent voters said the Trump administration’s healthcare policies have had a negative impact on their healthcare costs and the health and well-being of people in their communities. Republicans were likelier to say there hasn’t been an impact.

Talking on the phone from her 200-acre farm in Carroll County, Iowa, 71-year-old Donna Klocke said that her husband had died from cancer and that she has neighbors who also have cancer.

“It’s just very prevalent,” Klocke said. “We’re in a farming community. We use chemicals and pesticides and all kinds of things that aren’t necessarily good for us.”

Klocke, a Democrat, said the MAHA movement is a good idea because she cares about being healthy, but she does not consider herself part of it and will not be voting for a candidate who represents the movement.

Kennedy, who was an anti-vaccine activist before entering politics and has sent to Americans about , scares her.

“Measles are coming back and polio,” Klocke said. “It’s the measles that really gets me. It’s like, do you not understand how dangerous it is?”

Donna Klocke cares about being healthy but does not consider herself part of the Make America Healthy Again movement. Her husband died from cancer after a life spent farming the family’s 200 acres in Carroll County, Iowa. (Kathyrn Gamble for ��ýҕ�l Health News)

Survey Reflects Angst Over Healthcare

About half of rural voters said their communities don’t have enough doctors or other healthcare providers, and even more said there aren’t enough mental health workers specifically. The share of rural voters who said their community does not have enough hospitals increased to 35% from 21% in a similar question asked in a KFF-Washington Post survey in 2017.

And as with the general population, healthcare, gas, and grocery costs are top pain points. More than 6 in 10 rural voters said they were worried about healthcare costs.

The level of worry varied based on coverage, with rural voters enrolled in employer plans or Medicare less likely to be worried. The survey found that 80% of working-age rural voters on Medicaid were very or somewhat worried about healthcare costs. Last year, Republicans passed that cut over $900 billion in projected Medicaid spending over a decade and mandated new eligibility requirements.

Among rural voters who purchase their own insurance, such as the individual coverage plans available on Affordable Care Act marketplaces, 77% said they were worried.

In the tiny community of Lipan, Texas, west of Dallas, Kim Solis and her husband have a handyman-and-home-remodel business and get their insurance on the marketplace. Since Trump was elected again, their premium payment jumped from zero to $166 a month. Their copays went up, and their deductibles each increased by $2,000.

Solis, 62, said she worries what will happen if they get a big medical bill.

“Certainly, we’d be in a world of hurt trying to take money out of savings or getting it out of our 401(k) just to be able to do something about it,” she said.

Most MAHA Voters Are Also MAGA — But Not All

Like the general population, rural voters said they trust their own doctors and healthcare providers for health information over government agencies or officials, according to the poll.

Trust in Kennedy and Trump fell largely along partisan lines. About 10% of rural Democratic voters reported having a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in Kennedy, compared with 74% of rural Republican voters. About 5% of rural Democrats and 69% of rural Republicans said they trust Trump a “great deal” or “fair amount” for reliable health information.

While Make America Great Again and MAHA identities are “linked in a lot of ways,” the rising costs of healthcare and groceries pose a challenge for those committed to the MAHA principles that Kennedy promotes, said Peterson, the Iowa State professor.

Buying healthy food “becomes, ‘I can’t afford to do that because of Trump’s policies,’” he said.

In Stamping Ground, Kentucky, Alma Johnson, 65, works as night security at a horse farm. Johnson said gas had gone up but her overall cost of living had decreased since Trump took office.

Johnson voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024 and said she “pretty much” likes how Trump is running the country. But she said she is not a MAGA devotee, preferring to “think for myself.”

MAHA, however, is an easy sell for Johnson because, she said, she doesn’t think people should be able to buy junk food through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

Still, she said she hasn’t seen much impact from the Trump administration’s healthcare policies, including the .

“It takes a long time to change people, their habits, their thoughts, or the things they do,” Johnson said.

About the Poll

The KFF-AP Rural Voters Survey was conducted online and by telephone Aug. 12-24, 2026, among 2,241 registered voters living in rural areas, defined as census tracts that fall within codes 5-10 of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2020 Rural-Urban Commuting Area codes. Voters were reached through a combination of the probability-based SSRS Opinion Panel and a registration-based sample from the L2 voter file. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, including design effects due to weighting. Error margins are larger for subgroups. In collaboration with the AP, KFF researchers worked to design the survey sample and questionnaire and analyze and report findings.

This report is from a collaboration between ��ýҕ�l Health News and The Associated Press.

��ýҕ�l Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

This article first appeared on ��ýҕ�l Health News and is republished here under a .

These 100 Nursing Homes Face Perilous Flood Risk. Minnesota Shows What Can Happen.

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

NEW RICHLAND, Minn. — Floodwater seeped through the nursing home’s front door just before sunrise.

Inside the New Richland Care Center, staff members rushed to move 36 residents out of the building on Sept. 19 while they still could. They pushed elderly residents in wheelchairs through 4-inch-deep water to buses waiting in the parking lot, said nursing home administrator Robert Johannsen.

Inches turned to feet as the last three residents were wheeled out on hospital beds, lifted “as high as they can go” to escape the rising water, Johannsen said. Firefighters and volunteers from a high school football team pushed the beds to safety across the street, he said.

“It’s pretty devastating,” Johannsen said of the now-shuttered nursing home. “There was at least 2½ feet of water flowing down the hallways.”

The small-town, government-run nursing home is about 100 yards from a drainage ditch in southern Minnesota. It has flooded three times in 16 years, including during the September storm that was large but far from historic, according to the National Weather Service.

New Richland is one of 100 U.S. nursing homes that face some of the nation’s worst flood risk — where at least 2 feet of water during a big storm could endanger residents — according to a ��ýҕ�l Health News analysis of peer-reviewed flood hazard mapping provided by Fathom, a United Kingdom-based company considered a leader in flood simulation.

The ��ýҕ�l Health News analysis builds upon a 2025 investigation that used Fathom’s mapping to identify at least 170 U.S. hospitals at risk of significant flooding. Fathom’s estimates are generally seen as more modern than official flood maps released by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which are often out of date and don’t account for the changing climate.

“Every community across the United States carries some level of flood risk,” said Oliver Wing, the chief scientific officer at Fathom. “There is this idea that unless you can either see the ocean or the Mississippi from your front room, then you’re not at risk of flooding — when the reality is that anywhere rain can fall, it can flood.”

100 Nursing Homes at Risk of Dangerous Flooding

This map shows nursing homes located where severe weather is predicted to cause at least 2 feet of flooding — and, in some cases, far more — according to a ��ýҕ�l Health News analysis of proprietary flood hazard data.

Source: ��ýҕ�l Health News analysis of 100-year flood risk data from Fathom; Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
Credit: Holly K. Hacker, Brett Kelman, Daniel Chang, and Lydia Zuraw/��ýҕ�l Health News

The U.S. has nearly 15,000 nursing homes housing more than 1.2 million people. In floods and other disasters, the residents are especially vulnerable because many are medically frail, cognitively impaired, or immobile. Some require daily care that can’t be reliably provided during a disaster, yet they are also so fragile that relocation could send them to the emergency room.

Additionally, many nursing homes were built near coastlines or waterways in the 1970s, before widespread concern about climate change, to keep residents cool and content, said David Dosa, the head of geriatrics at the UMass Chan Medical School.

“It’s a lot more comfortable than being in an urban jungle,” Dosa said. “Obviously, now you’re in places that are a little more at risk.”

Dosa has studied nursing home evacuations since Hurricane Katrina flooded the New Orleans area in 2005. Dozens of people were killed in facilities that tried to ride out the storm and flooded after the levees broke.

After Katrina, the nursing home industry pivoted toward evacuations, although some of those decisions also led to deaths, Dosa said.

In preparation for the next three Gulf hurricanes, more than 270 nursing home evacuations were recorded, according to a Dosa co-wrote in 2011. Within the 30 days that followed each storm, the regions hit saw a cumulative total of 277 more nursing home resident deaths than expected, suggesting a “significant increase in mortality and morbidity associated with evacuation,” according to the study.

“It’s Russian roulette. You’re damned if you do. You are damned if you don’t,” Dosa said of evacuations. “Older adults and disasters don’t mix.”

A similar found a 16% greater chance of ER visits among residents of Florida assisted living facilities who were evacuated before Hurricane Irma in 2017. People in assisted living facilities generally need less care than those in nursing homes.

“Assisted living residents are quite frail in their own right,” said Cassandra Hua, an assistant professor at UMass Lowell, who led that study. “But nursing home residents are usually at higher risk. So anything you see in assisted living might be multiplied in a nursing home setting.”

Even a few inches of flooding can interrupt nursing home care and force an evacuation. For each of the 100 nursing homes identified by the ��ýҕ�l Health News analysis, Fathom’s data predicted a 100-year flood event could bring at least 2 feet of water to the buildings.

Aerial footage shows lingering floodwater in New Richland, Minnesota. The white-roofed New Richland Care Center can be seen along the upper-left edge of the ponding water. (WCCO/CBS Minnesota)

A 100-year flood is an intense weather event with a 1% chance of occurring in any given year, but it can happen more often. Climate scientists largely agree that extreme weather is worsening as the planet warms, which allows the atmosphere to hold more moisture and causes sea levels to rise.

And storms are drenching regions once considered at lower risk for flooding, where essential facilities and entire communities might be less prepared, said Drew Gronewold, a University of Michigan climate scientist. In other regions, storms are now less frequent but becoming “off-the-charts” powerful, he said.

“Storm tracks are changing their trajectory,” Gronewold said. “These types of, in air quotes, ‘unanticipated events’ are going to be part of our future.”

Some of the nursing homes ��ýҕ�l Health News has identified as at risk have flooded in the past five years, including facilities in Florida, Kentucky, Texas, and Washington.

Five of the facilities flooded in 2012 as Superstorm Sandy clobbered New York, according to a report from the , while a sixth, the elevated Seagate Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, narrowly . In Indiana, more than 150 people from the five-story Munster Med Inn during Hurricane Ike in 2008. Members of the National Guard carried some residents down flights of stairs in the dark.

Rescuers from the Indiana National Guard and the Munster Fire Department evacuate a resident of the Munster Med Inn in Indiana, in the wake of Hurricane Ike in 2008. More than 150 residents were evacuated, according to a U.S. Army news release. (Michael B. Krieg/Indiana National Guard)

Then there is the New Richland Care Center. Local media reports show it was evacuated due to flooding in 2010 and 2016, then partially surrounded by floodwater in 2023, before the Sept. 19 evacuation.

Storms dropped 4 to 8 inches of rain on much of southeastern Minnesota the day before, setting off widespread flooding, said National Weather Service meteorologist Brennan Dettmann. The rainfall was heavy for September but would not have been out of place in July, he said.

It was too much for New Richland. Storm runoff from nearby farms pooled in a low-lying baseball diamond at the edge of town before swamping nearby streets. Johannsen, the nursing home administrator, said maintenance workers who were trying to fix sewer drains called him in the middle of the night to warn about flooding in the park across the street.

“They said, ‘You need to come in. The water is rising,’” Johannsen said. “At that point, I think the water was a good 30 feet away from the building. I wasn’t really concerned.”

The New Richland Care Center in southeastern Minnesota flooded on Sept. 19, forcing the evacuation of 36 residents. Some residents were pushed on hospital beds through feet of floodwater to escape the facility, administrator Robert Johannsen says. (WCCO/CBS Minnesota)

Wing, the Fathom scientist, said the danger should have been obvious. Although Minnesota’s natural landscape once would have absorbed heavy rains, the farmland around New Richland funnels runoff into creeks and ditches that lead to a low-lying bowl near the nursing home. It’s almost as if the location is designed to flood, Wing said.

“The choice has been made that we don’t want water in our crop fields. We want it in the nursing homes of vulnerable people,” Wing said. “That’s the choice that has been made, politically, in that part of Minnesota.”

Inside the ruined nursing home, receding floodwaters left behind knee-high watermarks, mud-smeared floors, and a lingering smell that Johannsen said reminded him of growing up on a farm. Water destroyed treasured photo albums left behind in a low cabinet, he said.

Johannsen said the nursing home — which, with 85 employees, is one of the largest employers in town — will be closed for five months to a year for repairs. He said all its residents were moved into a school gymnasium and have been resettled across about nine area nursing homes.

“It was an awful experience that I hope nobody ever has to go through. Because these people lost homes,” Johannsen said. “My staff is losing their jobs. And I don’t know what to do.”

New Richland Care Center administrator Robert Johannsen (left) examines the damaged nursing home in the wake of a Sept. 19 flood that forced the evacuation of 36 residents. Johannsen says the facility will be closed for months for repairs. (WCCO/CBS Minnesota)

Methodology

For this analysis, we used data from Fathom, a United Kingdom-based company that specializes in flood-risk modeling worldwide. To assess the United States’ vulnerability, Fathom uses sophisticated computer simulations and detailed terrain data covering the country. It accounts for environmental factors such as climate change, soil conditions, and many rivers and creeks not mapped by other sources. Fathom’s modeling has been peer-reviewed and used by insurance companies, the World Bank Group, the Nature Conservancy, and government agencies in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere. The Iowa Flood Center has validated Fathom’s U.S. data.

Through a data use agreement, Fathom shared U.S. mapping data that predicts areas with at least a 1% chance of flooding in any given year. Fathom’s data estimates the effects of coastal, fluvial, and pluvial flooding and accounts for dams, reservoirs, and other structures that defend against floods.

To identify at-risk nursing homes, we used a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services database to map more than 14,000 nursing homes. With GPS coordinates as the center point, we created a circle with a 100-yard radius around each nursing home, which in most cases captured the building and nearby grounds. We then mapped Fathom’s flood-risk data to see where it overlapped with these circles. We started by looking for nursing homes where at least 20% of the circle’s area had a predicted flood depth of at least 1 foot. That gave us an initial list of more than 750 nursing homes.

Then we visually inspected those facilities using mapping software and Google Maps to confirm that floodwaters were predicted to reach or surround the buildings. We trimmed our list to the 100 nursing homes where the most flooding was predicted, with additional weight given to deeper water.

Our analysis does not account for how flooding beyond a nursing home’s footprint could still affect employees or patients. And it does not assess what steps facilities may have already taken to prepare for severe weather events.

Fathom provided guidance and feedback as we developed our analysis.

This article first appeared on ��ýҕ�l Health News and is republished here under a .

US Poised To Boot Legal Immigrants From Medicaid, Including Refugees and Sex-Trafficking Victims

Phil Galewitz, Andrew Jones and Claudia Boyd-Barrett — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants with legal status are at risk of losing government health coverage starting Oct. 1, state data shows, signaling that the impact of Medicaid changes in President Donald Trump’s signature legislation from 2025 may be greater than anticipated.

Many lawfully present immigrants will be among the first people to lose Medicaid coverage under congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is expected to cut spending by more than $900 billion through 2034 for the state-federal health program for people with low incomes or disabilities. The law will strip many more immigrants of their Affordable Care Act plan subsidies and Medicare coverage next year.

Those losing their health benefits who were previously eligible include refugees of war, asylees who fled persecution, victims of sex trafficking, and interpreters who risked their lives assisting U.S. service members in Afghanistan — all of whom are in the country with the federal government’s permission. The law does not affect coverage for a few groups, including those who hold green cards.

The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan budget scorekeeper, estimated the law’s changes eliminating Medicaid eligibility for many noncitizen adults with legal status would lead to about 100,000 more immigrants being .

��ýҕ�l Health News asked several states how many Medicaid enrollees they had identified as being at risk of losing coverage under the provision. More than 281,000 immigrants from nine states and the District of Columbia are expected to lose Medicaid in October.

While some may be able to obtain coverage elsewhere, the state numbers suggest hundreds of thousands of immigrants nationally are at imminent risk of becoming uninsured.

The CBO declined to comment.

Florida alone identified nearly 177,000 immigrants who would no longer qualify for the state’s Medicaid program starting in October, said Anna Holaday, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Children and Families. The agency verified the enrollees’ immigration status through government databases and sent notices to people to give them an opportunity to provide more information proving they remain eligible, Holaday said.

Arizona predicts nearly 28,000 could lose eligibility. New Jersey expects 15,000 to 25,000 of its noncitizen residents to lose their Medicaid coverage. In North Carolina, it’s about 29,000, and in Washington state it’s 11,000. Final numbers from states on how many Medicaid enrollees have been terminated from the program won’t be available until later this fall.

Lawmakers rely on the CBO to understand the budgetary and economic impacts of proposed legislation. Yet the federal agency did not publish estimates on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s impact on noncitizens enrolled in Medicaid until a month after Congress passed the bill and Trump signed it into law.

Much of the attention around Medicaid changes in the law has centered on implementation of work requirements as a new condition of eligibility for many enrollees starting in January. The CBO estimates the requirements will increase the number of uninsured Americans by about 5 million by 2034.

Without health coverage, immigrants are likely to lose access to doctors, prescription drugs, and most other medical services. They still could qualify for coverage of emergency care under a separate program known as Emergency Medicaid.

“I came here to live a better life,” said Ahin, a refugee who left war-torn Syria for Turkey in 2011 and came to the U.S. in October 2024. She spoke with ��ýҕ�l Health News on the condition that she be identified by only her first name, out of concern for her privacy and security.

Soon after arriving in the U.S., she developed severe abdominal pain that required intestinal surgery. Those costs, along with ongoing visits to specialists, were covered by Medicaid.

“I’m really worried about this,” she said. “It’s truly a terrible situation.”

Ahin, 25, said she doesn’t know what she will do if she needs to go to the hospital — she wouldn’t be able to pay the bill. She lives in a small apartment in New Jersey with her mother. Medicaid has also been vital to her mother, who has asthma.

Health Benefits Wane for Immigrants

The federal government required states to notify immigrants who will soon lose coverage, but immigrant rights advocates say some states did not begin sending letters until September. That’s given enrollees little time to react, including to respond if the state was mistakenly ending their coverage.

Cutting off Medicaid coverage is just the first move to drop government health benefits provided to many lawfully present immigrants. Under a change starting in January, the CBO estimates, about 1 million will lose eligibility for government subsidies to buy individual health coverage on Affordable Care Act marketplaces by 2034. And they will also lose access to Medicare, a change expected to affect about 100,000 immigrants, the agency forecasts.

Trump has argued that taxpayer-funded programs should be reserved for American citizens. As Congress debated the legislation in May 2025, the White House with the misleading claim that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would remove Medicaid coverage for people who are in the country without authorization.

Under long-standing law, people who are in the country without authorization do not qualify for the general Medicaid program that is funded by state and federal dollars.

The health coverage cuts are part of a broader Trump strategy to send a message that immigrants are not welcome in the United States, said Ben D’Avanzo, senior strategist for federal advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center. The Trump administration has also moved to kick people with legal status off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and tried to do the same with the children’s program Head Start until a federal judge intervened.

In addition to green card holders, people under age 19 and immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, or certain Pacific Island countries their Medicaid coverage affected by the law.

A Few States Try To Fill in the Gaps

Some states are staving off the coverage loss using their own money. California expects about 148,000 immigrants to lose Medicaid coverage. But the state is spending $365 million for a separate program to keep them covered until July 2027, according to Tony Cava, a spokesperson for the California Department of Health Care Services.

New York and Pennsylvania also have state-funded health coverage for many of the immigrants who are affected.

Carlos Alarcón, health and public benefits policy manager with the California Immigrant Policy Center, an advocacy group, said taking away health coverage for immigrants will affect the health of the state as a whole. The fewer people who have access to healthcare, the easier it will be for contagious diseases to spread, as happened during the covid pandemic, he said.

Alarcón said he hopes the state-funded coverage will be extended under California’s next governor. Polling released in September showed Democrat Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden, leading Republican Steve Hilton in the gubernatorial race. Becerra to issue an executive order to maintain health coverage for every Californian affected by federal cuts.

In California Governor’s Race, Voters Face Stark Choice on Immigrant Healthcare

California’s next governor will face tough decisions on a highly controversial piece of healthcare policy: what to do about health coverage for the more than 1.4 million low-income residents without legal status. Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton present starkly different choices as public opinion wavers.

By Christine Mai-Duc July 6, 2026

“I believe there’s folks in the legislature that will really want to fight to make sure that we restore things as much as we can,” Alarcón said.

Refugee assistance groups say they have been trying to educate people in their communities and direct them to health clinics that are government-funded or free.

“We’ve just been scrambling trying to find free medical care,” said , co-founder of the . “To not be a welcoming place is the most un-American thing I’ve ever experienced.”

Andrea Mendez Perez, director at Interfaith-RISE, a refugee resettlement organization in southern New Jersey, said the Trump administration has elongated the process for people to get green cards and is now taking away coverage from those without them. Before 2025, it typically took about six months to qualify for a green card, documentation that allows a foreign national to live and work permanently in the United States, she said. Today, it’s well over a year.

For many of these immigrants on Medicaid, losing their ability to get their prescribed medications “is a life-or-death situation,” Mendez Perez said.

Ahin, the Syrian refugee, applied for permanent residency soon after arriving in the U.S. two years ago. Mendez Perez said she should have her green card by now, which would have spared her from being dropped under the GOP law. “She is stuck in the middle and has no control.”

Colleen McCauley, policy and advocacy director at the Camden Coalition, a nonprofit that helps connect people to healthcare in southern New Jersey, said the loss of coverage is devastating.

“None of them did anything wrong,” McCauley said, “and they are losing coverage.”

This article first appeared on ��ýҕ�l Health News and is republished here under a .

After Failed Execution, Health Workers Say State’s Rules Flout Medical Ethics

Catherine Sweeney, WPLN — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

This story describes a lethal injection procedure used in state executions.

In May, a group of healthcare workers spent about an hour trying to establish complete IV access so they could inject Tony Carruthers, an inmate at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, with a lethal dose of sedative.

Maria DeLiberato, an attorney for Carruthers, was in the room. She said the workers stuck his arms and feet with needles, to no avail. A doctor then tried to insert a central line through his collarbone and shoulder. That didn’t work, either.

Carruthers groaned in pain and blood oozed from puncture wounds, DeLiberato said in a news briefing.

After more than an hour, Gov. Bill Lee called the warden, ordering him to halt the execution attempt. He later granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve.

Now, as another approaches, doctors and nurses in the state say they want medical professionals removed from the execution process. They’ve also joined defense attorneys and nine Republican state lawmakers in demanding a moratorium on the death penalty and an overhaul of the state’s execution methods.

The doctors’ arguments echoed those the American Medical Association has made and in its code of ethics.

Tennessee is where the death penalty is legal, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that offers data and analysis on issues surrounding capital punishment.

Governors in four of those states have halted all executions, citing and , such as being unable to obtain lethal injection drugs amid pharmaceutical companies’ refusal to sell them for use in executions. Lethal injection is still the primary nationwide, but some states may use , a , or .

Since the beginning of 2020, 170 people have been executed in 17 states, with most occurring in Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma. In that time, six states have had , according to the , which defines those as executions that include a departure from the protocol because of unanticipated problems and that cause more pain for the prisoner than anticipated, whether they ultimately end with a death or not. Several of the stories read like Carruthers’ — protracted but ultimately failed attempts to establish IV access.

Tennessee Health Workers’ Concerns

The IV team gave up on trying to place a typical line into Carruthers after several failed attempts, according to DeLiberato’s account. , physician Mark Fowler, a contractor for the state’s prison system, then tried to place a central line in a deeper vein. That’s a quasi-surgical procedure in which a plastic tube is inserted in the chest, groin, or neck. Fowler used a series of syringes, trying to insert the tube under Carruthers’ collarbone and then through his shoulder.

In an , Fowler said he hadn’t done such a procedure in the 12 years since he had stopped working in an emergency room, and didn’t know that placing a central line could be among his execution duties.

Fowler told NPR by phone on Sept. 24 that “the doctor does not participate in the execution. The only thing the doctor does is declare the person dead.” He did not have further comment.

Two months after the halted lethal injection, more than 40 doctors and nurses to Lee, calling on the Republican governor to pause executions and redesign the protocol to omit health workers from the process.

The letter said that Tennessee’s rules requiring the participation of pharmacists, physicians, and other healthcare workers in executions are at odds with medical ethics, as well as guidelines explicitly laid out by groups such as the American Medical Association. The doctors are to preserve life when there is hope of doing so and bars participation in executions.

“This means that the health care professionals who agree to take part in Tennessee’s executions are those willing to set aside their professional ethics,” the letter to Lee reads. “The problems that we have seen, such as in Mr. Carruthers’s case, are the predictable result of working with such unscrupulous actors.”

John Greer, a retired Nashville hematologist, said in a news conference about the letter that he wasn’t surprised the central line placement went awry.

“Placing a central line is not just sticking a needle in a person’s arm,” he said.

Greer said the doctor has to tap a large vessel above the heart. He said that it’s a risky procedure in which an error could cause a collapsed lung or heavy bleeding — and that only those with specific training and routine practice should attempt.

“And I cannot imagine that there would be someone who’s doing these routinely who would be involved in this procedure,” Greer said.

Some Republican state senators also hold on executions and an overhaul of the process, saying that “incompetent administration” of capital punishment gives its critics more ammunition.

This summer, Lee said he didn’t want a pause.

“The Department of Correction did exactly what they should,” he said. “It should not affect executions in the future.”

“It’s one of the most difficult things that we do in this state,” Lee said later. “But I am committed to making sure that it is done in the way that it should be.”

The state’s lethal injection protocol orders the prison to keep a curtain over the media witnesses’ viewing window until the IVs are established, so none of them could offer a visual account of the failed execution attempt.

A has been filed has been filed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and news outlets including NPR member station WPLN. The lawsuit argues the lack of transparency during the IV placement process obscures problems like the ones that happened in Carruthers’ case.

There’s a broad understanding in the U.S. that the medical establishment doesn’t participate in executions, said , director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado’s medical school.

“We came out of World War II with a whole bioethics and medical ethics enterprise that is really strongly opposed to medicine serving as an arm of the state and using specialized medical skills to hurt people or kill people,” Wynia said.

A history of medical abuses by government doctors — such as and unethical studies of in the U.S., and in Nazi Germany — forged that consensus, he said.

Wynia mentioned other nations where medical professionals still participate in executions.

“But they are, you know, Iran and Saudi Arabia and Russia, sort of authoritarian states, where medicine is an arm of the government,” Wynia said. “Medical involvement in executions ends up happening because medicine is unable to say, ‘No, we don’t do that.’”

Upcoming Execution

On Sept. 30, Tennessee is scheduled to execute Christa Pike, who was 18 years old when she and her boyfriend killed Colleen Slemmer.

Pike’s attorneys this year raised several concerns that the state’s lethal injection protocol would violate her rights. Among them is their contention that because she suffers from a platelet disorder, it’s likely she will need a central line placed. They also argued that she was at risk of needless suffering, alleging Carruthers’ execution showed that Fowler — who has that he will oversee Pike’s execution — is incompetent at placing central lines.

In June, they put all of those concerns to the Tennessee Supreme Court, asking for a special investigator to collect evidence and hold hearings to determine whether they warranted an order to delay her execution and design a method for only her.

The court did appoint a special investigator, Senior Judge Mark Ward. He held a series of hearings in Knoxville last month. Ward said he didn’t believe Pike’s rights would be violated by the process and submitted to the court.

On Sept. 23, the Tennessee Supreme Court , agreeing with Ward, saying none of the concerns amounted to a constitutional violation. On Sept. 28, Lee announced he would not grant her clemency.

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Republicans and Democrats Find a Unifying Target: Pharmacy Benefit Managers

Blake Farmer, Nashville Public Radio — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Amye Joseph says America’s political polarization has made it an “interesting time” in her Tennessee household. She and her husband, Charlie, have been married 35 years. She’s a Republican. He’s a Democrat.

But their shared disenchantment with profit-driven healthcare has provided a unifying target: pharmacy benefit managers, known as PBMs. The Josephs’ frustration is focused on CVS Health. The conglomerate, which reported $400 billion in revenue last year, includes a major health insurer (Aetna), one of the country’s dominant PBMs (CVS Caremark), and America’s largest retail pharmacy chain.

“We hate CVS. I’m going to be straight-up,” Amye Joseph said.

She laments the lack of face-to-face interaction with pharmacists, prices that seem to rise without explanation, and pressure from the couple’s CVS Caremark drug plan to use CVS stores instead of their local pharmacy. “They’re not even a middleman,” she said. “They’re a money grab for CVS.”

PBMs were conceived as a way to manage prescriptions and hold down costs. But these middlemen have become bipartisan punching bags, accused of sucking up profits at the expense of employers, governments, and patients.

And while healthcare debates still divide Democrats and Republicans in Washington, D.C., taking on PBMs has become a unifying cause in an era of widespread frustration over rising healthcare costs.

In recent years, every state has imposed restrictions on PBMs. The Josephs’ home state of Tennessee, where the GOP has a lock on state government, is among a growing number looking to outlaw companies that own PBMs from also owning brick-and-mortar pharmacies, as CVS does.

That’s aligned conservative, business-friendly Republicans with Democrats traditionally more open to government regulation.

This legislative push reflects a feeling even in the GOP that the market for prescription drugs is being gamed, said Antonio Ciaccia, CEO of , a nonprofit think tank that tracks drug pricing.

“Republicans are looking at this issue, saying, We know what competition is supposed to do, and it isn’t happening,” said Ciaccia, a critic of the PBM industry. “This is not a free market.”

Charlie Joseph, a retired fire captain who now works as a custodian, was miffed when he realized he could save money on his blood pressure medication if he paid cash at his local pharmacy rather than using his CVS Caremark drug plan. He now buys a 90-day supply for the same price he would have paid for a 30-day supply through the CVS plan.

The Josephs don’t like dealing with pharmacy benefit managers. PBMs, designed as intermediaries between drugmakers and insurance companies to negotiate drug prices, have become targets of bipartisan anger over health costs. (Earl Neikirk for ��ýҕ�l Health News)

“Right now, it’s more of an inconvenience than anything else as far as it goes, but there’s no consistency,” he said. “The whole healthcare thing is just frustrating, on a good day.”

CVS spokesperson Phil Blando said the price of individual drugs can vary.

“Looking at the price of a single prescription does not reflect the value of a comprehensive pharmacy benefit,” he said in a statement. “Our focus remains delivering the lowest possible total cost and the greatest overall value for members and plan sponsors.”

Unified Opposition

PBM officials say their industry has been unfairly maligned. “PBMs are the only part of the prescription drug supply chain working to lower drug costs, which makes PBMs the target of powerful groups, Big Pharma and pharmacists,” said Greg Lopes, a spokesperson for the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, which represents PBMs across the nation.

“Drug manufacturers attempt to shift blame for high drug costs to PBMs in order to retain their profit margins and weaken PBMs’ ability to lower costs,” he said.

Drugmakers have worked for years to cast PBMs as unnecessary go-betweens, said Barak Richman, a lawyer and economist who studies healthcare competition at George Washington University. He called the fight between the two industries a corporate “cage match.”

“We have wildly passionate partisan divides on a lot of healthcare,” he said. “But there’s a lot of healthcare policy that I don’t think is obviously partisan.”

PBMs haven’t won over many Democrats or Republicans. Attorneys general from nearly 40 states and U.S. territories last year to congressional leaders arguing that “horizontal consolidation and vertical integration have transformed PBMs from useful administrative service providers into market-dominating behemoths.”

In state legislatures like Tennessee’s, shared ownership of PBMs and pharmacies has drawn particular fire. Independent pharmacies have little choice but to contract with major PBMs while also competing with the conglomerate-owned pharmacies. Many lawmakers have said they want to protect small businesses.

“If a corporation argues that its pharmacy cannot survive unless it is owned by the same entity that sets the reimbursement rate, then we’re not talking about a free market. We’re talking about control,” Tennessee state Sen. Bobby Harshbarger said in a February legislative hearing.

Harshbarger, a Republican who led the legislative push, is a pharmacist in a small city in northeastern Tennessee.

His mother, U.S. Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.), is also a pharmacist and has sponsored a similar PBM ownership ban . The Senate version has brought together some unlikely bedfellows, such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.).

State Lawmakers vs. CVS

CVS officials argued the Tennessee legislation was misguided. “Any proposed reform should be evaluated based on whether it improves access to care, simplifies the patient experience, and enhances affordability,” Blando said.

It’s unclear whether the PBM ownership ban will do that in Tennessee. by the state legislature’s researchers concluded that the bill could drive up healthcare costs in the short term.

To fight the bill, CVS launched a $7 million , claiming it would have to close all its 134 pharmacies in the state, similar to its threat in neighboring Arkansas when state lawmakers there passed in 2025.

CVS also sent to Tennessee customers, asking them to contact their lawmakers to keep pharmacies open. from CVS helped kill a PBM ownership ban in Louisiana last year.

Sponsors of the legislation said closure wasn’t the only option: CVS could also divest either its stores or its PBM.

Tennessee lawmakers moved forward. State Sen. Rusty Crowe, a Republican from northeastern Tennessee, where the Josephs live, told his colleagues before the vote that they should consider the fierce resistance a sign that they were onto something.

“I learned when I was in the Vietnam War, when you start taking on flak, you know you’re over the damn target,” he said.

As with most votes in Tennessee’s legislature, Republicans didn’t need support from Democrats. But they got it anyway.

State Rep. Antonio Parkinson, a Democrat from Memphis, said he felt like he was voting in favor of lower drug prices and supporting “ma and pa” pharmacies. “If there’s a benefit to my people, I’m supporting it.”

CVS has not divested or closed its pharmacies in states that have passed ownership bans — the laws have yet to take effect. The Arkansas ban is being held up in court after CVS challenged the constitutionality of the law. CVS also sued in Tennessee, though the ownership ban doesn’t take effect until 2028.

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Abortion Is on the Ballot Again as Post-Roe Policies Continue To Evolve

Bram Sable-Smith and Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

MAPLEWOOD, Mo. — After Missouri voters added abortion protections to the state constitution in 2024, Kelly McCoomb decided to keep her yard sign supporting the measure in the basement of her suburban St. Louis home.

Abortion access is important to McCoomb. She wants her daughter to grow up in a state where the option is available if needed, and the sign was a keepsake from the day Missourians voted to reverse the state’s near-total ban. McCoomb also couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d need to display the sign in her yard again soon.

“I have little faith in our Missouri government,” McCoomb said, sitting on her front porch.

Sure enough, just two years later, the state’s Republican-dominated legislature is asking Missouri voters to overturn the abortion protections they recently supported. The conflicting measures even have the same title: Amendment 3. But while a “yes” vote in 2024 supported adding protections to the state constitution, a “no” vote in 2026 would keep them. McCoomb covered the “YES” on her yard sign with a “NO” made from black duct tape before placing the sign back in her yard.

Voters will weigh in on abortion in Missouri, and three other states, in the November general election. Missouri is also one of two states voting on it for the second time since 2024. Nevada will vote again, too.

The spate of referendums comes after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned federal abortion protections with its 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, leaving each state to make its own abortion policy. The result has been a patchwork of state rules of bans or limitations, and even a series of “shield laws” in states where abortion remains legal that aim to protect providers from prosecution in states where it’s not.

“I just think there’s a constitutional crisis that’s coming,” said , vice president of media and policy for the anti-abortion organization Students for Life Action.

“Can you have 50 state standards on whether or not a human being is a human being? Can you have 50 state standards on whether human beings have legal protection?” Hamrick said.

Advocacy Groups Work To Clarify Ballot Measures

That patchwork of abortion protections is the reason Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom introduced the 2024 ballot measure to enshrine the state’s law allowing abortions up to 24 weeks after conception into the state constitution, said , president of the coalition.

The measure received strong support two years ago, with 64% of voters in favor. Nevada law requires two majority votes to enshrine constitutional amendments, so voters will need to support the expanded protection again in November for it to be enacted.

The Nevada ballot measure wouldn’t change the state’s existing law allowing abortions up to 24 weeks after conception. But the proposal would make it more difficult to overturn abortion access, requiring voter approval of any new ban in two elections.

Lopez said Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom has been campaigning to ensure voters are still mobilized.

“Folks care about it,” she said. “They’re seeing what’s happening at the national level, and they want to make sure that whatever’s happening in our neighboring states, like Idaho and Utah, doesn’t happen here in Nevada.”

Idaho, where a ballot measure establishing abortion rights to go before voters in November, has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country. Voters will decide whether state statute should allow abortion through fetal viability, the point when a fetus can survive after birth, which is generally considered to be around 24 weeks.

In Utah, abortion is allowed up to 18 weeks while legal challenges to the state’s ban continue.

In Virginia, where abortion is already allowed through two trimesters of pregnancy, until 28 weeks, voters will decide whether to amend their state constitution to codify those rights.

Missouri is the only state voting this year on removing abortion protections already on the books. The the 2024 amendment that guaranteed abortion access through fetal viability in the state and replace it with a ban on abortions with exceptions for medical emergencies, fetal anomalies, and pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. Abortions for rape and incest would have to occur before 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Missouri was the first state to ban abortion after the Dobbs decision in 2022. At that time, abortions had already mostly ceased in the state after three decades of state regulations targeting the practice, including a , minimum dimensions for procedure rooms and hallways in clinics that provide abortions, and a mandate that the clinicians have at nearby hospitals, among others. Only were performed in Missouri in 2021, down from , state records show.

Even though Missouri voters backed the abortion amendment in 2024, it took nearly two years for medication abortions to resume in the state.

A Second Vote Causes Confusion

, CEO of St. Louis-based Planned Parenthood Great Rivers, said the whiplash of a second statewide vote on abortion mirrors the confusion that patients have experienced about whether abortion is available in the state.

“Chaos is kind of the point here,” Riphagen-Dunn said, “and it is absolutely a tactic that gets in the way of being able to provide.”

The confusion has presented problems for abortion opponents in the state as well.

“I think it’s unfortunate,” said Reagan Barklage, who is a vice president of Students for Life of America and the treasurer of the Missouri Students for Life Ballot Committee. “People need to be very clear on what they’re voting for.”

Barklage said she has had to correct anti-abortion voters while out canvassing to remind them that they are voting “yes” on Amendment 3 this year even though they voted “no” on Amendment 3 last time.

“It is crazy that it ended up being even the same number. I do not think that was intentional, but we’ve got to deal with what we’ve got,” Barklage said, adding, “I hope the pro-choicers kept their yard signs from last time.”

In Maplewood, Missouri, McCoomb said she was happy that her repurposed sign supporting abortion access had been noticed.

“I hope lots of people see and remember to revote,” McCoomb said.

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Black Lung Disease Remains a Threat, but Federal Officials Delay Effort To Address It

Taylor Sisk — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

OAK HILL, W.Va. — Each day at New River Health in Oak Hill, Lisa Emery finds disheartening signs of what she describes as a slow-motion repeat of the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster.

Emery is director of New River’s Breathing Center and chair of the .

The disaster she’s reminded of started in 1930, when on a 3-mile tunnel through Gauley Mountain in West Virginia. Over the course of 18 months, some 3,000 miners, most of them Black, spent long hours drilling through sandstone, engulfed in a cloud of its toxic byproduct, silica dust. More than 750 men died from that exposure.

The risk still exists, and advocates for workers say the government should do more to rein it in.

In April of last year, the Trump administration paused the enforcement of a rule designed to help protect coal miners from an aggressive form of coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, commonly known as black lung disease, the primary cause of which is exposure to silica dust.

(Other occupations at high risk of include construction, countertop fabrication, and oil and gas work. The new rule would reduce the permissible limit of exposure in coal mining to the existing level in other industries.)

This April, the Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration announced an indefinite delay in enforcement of the rule.

Gary Hairston sits on New River Health’s board. For decades, Hairston, a retired coal miner and president of the national , has been an advocate for miners struggling with the debilitating effects of black lung, including extreme fatigue, an incessant cough, and a sensation of drowning. He regularly lobbies legislators for improved working conditions and black lung benefits. His entreaties, he said, seem to fall on deaf ears. He rarely gets an audience with the legislators themselves.

“I’d just like them to look me in the face,” Hairston said.

Gary Hairston, president of the Black Lung Association, says his lobbying of legislators for improved working conditions and black lung benefits for coal miners seems to fall on deaf ears. (Taylor Sisk for ��ýҕ�l Health News)

Evidence from just-released research underscores the urgency of his appeals for a safer work environment.

In August, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency within the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on the results of testing conducted over the past five years on miners in central Appalachia — eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, and West Virginia — with 25 or more years underground. Almost 1 in 3 tested positive for black lung disease, the highest rate in nearly 50 years.

The rate in 2018, the last time the agency reported results, was 1 in 5. The lowest reported rate, in 1999, was less than 1 in 10.

“We knew this would happen,” said Sam Petsonk, a West Virginia attorney who has represented thousands of miners in the region. “It’s surprising to me that they only found one in three.”

Silica Dangers

Exposure to silica has increased as more-accessible coal seams are depleted, requiring mining operations to probe deeper, often through sandstone. The stone breaks into sharp particles that are than a grain of sand and, according to National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health research, are than coal dust. Trapped in lung tissue, those particles can cause a debilitating, sometimes fatal condition.

Kenny Thompson, a retired West Virginia miner who now lives in Richmond, Kentucky, was employed in the mines for 22 years. He would sometimes cut into four feet of sandstone to reach a coal seam.

“You ate a lot of dust,” Thompson recalled. It induced nausea. It took a toll.

In October 2025, he had his left lung removed. Post-surgery, he was in a coma for three months; he flatlined three times, he said. “They were about to really give up on me.”

He had to relearn to walk and to talk. Trekking to the mailbox still leaves him winded, lightheaded, and blurry-eyed.

The new silica rule would cut the allowable level of silica dust in half, thereby meeting the standard of other industries. Miner advocates laud the fact that it would require operators to deploy engineering controls, such as improved ventilation systems and water sprays.

But the National Mining Association and other industry trade groups argue that reaching and maintaining compliance would also require supplementing those controls with workforce measures, such as requiring personal protection equipment and rotating miners from particularly dusty areas. Many miners, and their advocates, say such measures are impractical — because respirators can impede breathing, can limit vision, and often malfunction, and because smaller mines don’t have enough workers to support rotating schedules.

In April 2025, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted an emergency stay of the rule to give operators more time to comply.

In May of this year, the Labor Department sent the White House Office of Management and Budget a on the proposed rule. And in July, the department’s regulatory agenda included a new , indicating its intent to amend the rule.

The department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration “recognizes it has a clear duty under the law to impose stricter silica standards,” said Petsonk, the attorney representing coal miners. “They’re failing to provide that measure of protection to American coal miners, so they’re going through bureaucratic motions to make it seem like they’re doing something, when, in fact, they’re just perpetuating an illegal and lethal status quo.”

The Labor Department declined to comment on ongoing rulemaking or litigation.

“We knew this would happen,” West Virginia attorney Sam Petsonk says of a recently released report showing that the black lung rate for coal miners in central Appalachia is at a nearly 50-year high. (Taylor Sisk for ��ýҕ�l Health News)

‘It’s On the Books’

The rule is, in fact, in effect, said Chris Williamson, head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration in the Biden administration — it’s just not being enforced. He and his team filed a legal brief in the closing days of the administration defending the rule.

“It’s on the books,” Williamson said, adding that the prohibits weakening existing protections for miners. “I’m just genuinely curious,” he said. “I want to know how they can address the issues that the industry’s raised without weakening protections for miners.”

Meanwhile, younger miners, with a decade or less in the mines, are being diagnosed with advanced stages of black lung. New River Health’s Emery said the youngest person her clinic had diagnosed with was 30. He’d worked underground for 10 years.

This is no longer just your “papaw’s disease,” she said. “It’s your husband’s disease. It’s your son’s disease.” (More than 90% of coal miners are men.)

With families to support, Emery said, “what do these guys do when they’re disabled in their 30s?”

Lisa Emery is director of the New River Health Breathing Center in West Virginia and chair of the National Coalition of Black Lung and Respiratory Disease Clinics. She says the youngest person her clinic has diagnosed with complicated black lung was 30. (Taylor Sisk for ��ýҕ�l Health News)

She told of a man who sat in her office with his wife, describing his symptoms. As he spoke, he began to cry. His wife was taken aback. “‘I didn’t know it was that bad,’” Emery recalled her saying. “And he said: ‘That’s why I haven’t fixed the deck. I haven’t fixed the deck because I can’t breathe, and I’m just so tired.’”

Thompson can relate. “For 22 years, you’re used to getting up, putting your boots on every day, and going to work,” he said. “I’d been in great health shape and 160 pounds. And here I am now, I don’t work at all and I’m 115 pounds.”

Still, he recognizes what the job afforded.

“You know, it put my girls through college,” he said. “And to me, as a dad, that was the best reward that I can give them, to move forward in life, to be successful at what they chose to be and not work like a dog like I had to.”

President Donald Trump said in an : “Our Nation’s beautiful clean coal resources will be critical to meeting the rise in electricity demand due to the resurgence of domestic manufacturing and the construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers.”

Six months later, the Energy Department announced a to “expand and reinvigorate America’s coal industry.”

Should the administration announce a weaker rule, it would be “an unconscionable crime against American coal miners,” Petsonk said. “But I fear that’s going to happen.”

In June, Hairston spoke at a reception for a photo exhibit titled “.”

“It seems like coal miners, we’re just a number,” he said. “Just a number.”

This article first appeared on ��ýҕ�l Health News and is republished here under a .

Economic Frustration Tests Trump’s Standing With Rural Voters, New KFF-AP Poll Finds

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 10:01:00 +0000

About half of rural American voters believe the economy is worse off now than when President Donald Trump returned to office, according to a that points to economic frustration among a key group that has backed Trump and other Republicans in recent elections.

The poll of more than 2,000 rural registered voters by The Associated Press in partnership with KFF found broadly negative views on the national and local economies, including from many Republicans. The costs of groceries, gas, and healthcare rank as top pain points for the rural voters, who were surveyed over two weeks starting in mid-August. And a larger share than among voters overall say they are worried about being able to afford groceries or gas.

At the same time, about half of rural voters approve of Trump’s job performance, more than among U.S. adults overall in separate AP-NORC polling.

The findings suggest that many rural voters haven’t turned on Trump but that they also largely don’t think he has delivered the economic renaissance he promised on the campaign trail.

Ed Westrick, a registered Republican and veteran, rates Trump’s job performance as “mediocre, middle-of-the-road.” Westrick, who lives in rural Texas, isn’t sure he will cast a midterm ballot, a troubling sign for Republicans in a key state in their fight to keep control of Congress.

Rural Americans skew Republican and historically have been an instrumental group of voters for Trump. The survey reveals that while rural voters seem unlikely to support Democrats on a large scale, Trump and the Republican Party could face challenges with them in November.

Deep Unhappiness About the Economy

As the election approaches, only about 4 in 10 rural voters approve of Trump’s performance on the economy. They rate him similarly on his handling of the Iran war, an entanglement that has proved expensive for the U.S. and increased oil and gas prices. And rural voters rank pocketbook concerns and fraud in government programs higher among the things they want to hear about from politicians than other perennial issues, such as gun policy and abortion.

Westrick, 59, is a technical trainer in the electronics industry and has seen an increase in business in part because he works with defense contractors, but he said he’s concerned about the cost of living.

“I hear the politicians talk about making groceries more affordable and making healthcare more affordable but yet none of them are addressing the issues,” Westrick said.

Westrick adjusts a roof on a small building at his home in rural Texas. (LM Otero/AP)

In the poll, about three-quarters of rural voters rated the cost of living in their communities as “only fair” or “poor” — up from about half in a KFF-Washington Post survey in 2017. Rural Americans, who have consistently lower wages than those who live in suburban and metro areas, have been hurting economically for decades, according to Tim Slack, a professor of sociology at Louisiana State University and co-author of the book Rural and Small-Town America.

“Many folks are connecting the cost-of-living crisis to many of the Trump administration’s policy choices: the war in Iran, tariffs, trade wars,” Slack said. “None of those things are going to bring down prices at the pump or the local Walmart.”

“Trump promised to lower prices on Day 1, and instead the cost of living’s continued to climb. And that’s especially painful in rural America,” Slack said, adding that he expects many working-class Republicans to skip voting in November.

Rural Republicans do have a brighter economic perspective than rural Democrats or independents, particularly about the U.S. as a whole, according to the survey. About 6 in 10 rural Republican voters say Trump has improved the national economy, compared with only about 2 in 10 independents and fewer than 1 in 10 Democrats.

But only 45% of rural Republican voters say Trump has made their local economies better off. About 1 in 4 said there are fewer good-paying jobs where they live than five years ago.

In Michigan, 37-year-old independent voter Brittainy Sosebee said she isn’t sure if she will vote in the state’s midterm election, which includes a tight Senate race seen as crucial to the Democratic Party’s push to win back a majority. Sosebee voted for Trump in 2016 and Democratic candidate Joe Biden in 2020; she didn’t vote in 2024.

Sosebee, who lives in St. Johns, a small town just north of Lansing, said she used to have extra money to take a vacation or buy a new pair of jeans without worrying. Now, she scrutinizes every expense, cringing at the rising cost of fresh produce when she shops for her three children.

“We hunt, so we have a lot of venison and things like that, so we don’t have to buy meat from the grocery store, but it’s still crippling,” she said.

Healthcare Policies Go Unnoticed

The KFF-AP poll found that rural voters overall don’t perceive much positive impact from the Trump administration’s healthcare policies even as they have been a top priority for Republican leaders, who have promoted efforts to lower drug costs and touted a $50 billion rural health program.

Only 17% of the voters said the Trump administration’s healthcare policies have had a “positive impact” on their healthcare costs, while 41% said they’ve had “no impact” and another 41% said they’ve had a “negative impact.”

Sitting on her front porch in Woolwich, Maine, 71-year-old Democrat Kathleen Hanning sipped a chai tea latte in the sun and recalled how she stopped voting for Republican Sen. Susan Collins in 2020.

Collins and Trump are “intertwined,” Hanning said. “She is not independently voting on what’s best for Maine.”

Hanning, a retired federal worker, said she hadn’t paid much attention to the health policies in Trump’s signature tax-break-and-spending-cut bill passed last year. The law reduces federal Medicaid spending by roughly $900 billion over a decade but also includes the billions of dollars for the Rural Health Transformation Program, which it created.

A year after the law’s passage, more than 8 in 10 rural voters said they’d heard either “a little” or “nothing at all” about the health fund. About 60% said they had heard nothing, according to the survey.

Rather than transforming, Hanning said, “hospitals up here in Maine are consolidating.” She travels an hour to see a specialist and noted that mothers will now have to drive farther for care because the hospital in nearby Damariscotta announced it would soon close its labor and delivery center.

Nine in 10 rural voters said it was “extremely” or “very” important for candidates to talk about healthcare costs, with more than half saying it’s “extremely important.” Mirroring the general population, rural voters ranked healthcare costs and gas prices as top economic worries.

Rural Republican Voters Still Trust GOP More

When asked which political party they trusted to do a better job handling issues such as the cost of healthcare or the cost of living, rural voters tended to side with their own party. The finding signals that Democratic candidates are more likely to benefit from rural Republicans’ staying home this November than from their voting across party lines in large numbers.

Republicans are more ambivalent about their party’s ability to handle key healthcare issues, compared with Democrats. About 8 in 10 Democratic voters say they trust the Democrats to address healthcare costs, while closer to 6 in 10 Republican voters say the same of the Republicans.

In Manassas, Georgia, a tiny town about an hour’s drive inland from Savannah, Republican voter Wanda Rogers feels the Trump administration is doing the best it can to clean up what she sees as an economic mess that Democrats left behind when they lost power.

“I kind of think people think like I do, that he knows what needs to be done,” she said. “It’s just taking them a while to get it there.”

Still, the 66-year-old said, “gas prices, they’re eating me alive right now.” She said she has stopped traveling to the beach because it has become too expensive.

Pamela Shaw, an independent voter who lives in a rural area near Asheville, North Carolina, said she sees the impact of rising costs in her community.

“When hamburger is over $7 a pound and steak is $15 or more a pound, a lot of people are not able to buy some of the things that they are used to buying,” the 59-year-old said in an interview.

Trump’s Rural Standing Has Slipped

Trump remains relatively popular among rural voters in the KFF-AP poll, with 48% approval — substantially higher than in a July AP-NORC poll of U.S. adults overall, in which only a third approved of his performance. But he’s also down slightly, from 56% approval, among rural voters, based on a similar question asked in the earlier KFF-Washington Post survey.

Asunta Washington, 38, is a truck driver who lives in South Texas. He said he is not against voting for Republican candidates if he wholeheartedly agrees with what they stand for, but he has not seen that. Instead, he has seen a lot of flip-flopping, he said.

“Like, a lot of people that are giving us promises and the moment they get elected, all that’s out the window,” Washington said.

Asunta Washington, a truck driver in New Braunfels, Texas, says he’d be open to voting for Republican candidates if their views aligned with his. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

This year’s competitive elections feature key Senate races in states including Ohio, Michigan, and Maine, all of which have large rural populations. In close races, Democrats may have a chance to “show up and give a message that rural people might find appealing,” said Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist at Colby College and co-author of the book The Rural Voter.

“But it’s nothing more and it’s nothing less than that — an opportunity,” Jacobs said. “And time and time again, Democrats have shown a certain proclivity for not seizing that opportunity.”

Many rural voters don’t think the major parties or the president respect people like them. About half, 48%, of rural voters say the GOP respects people like them “a lot” or “some,” while 45% of rural voters say this about Trump and 37% say this about the Democratic Party.

On a recent Thursday, registered Republican Nate Lawrence answered his phone after paying $57 to fill up his Chevy Equinox in New Concord, Ohio, a village of fewer than 3,000 people about an hour’s drive east of Columbus.

Lawrence, a middle school English teacher, said the candidates should be talking about spending power: “I need to be able to go to the store and feed my family on what I make as a teacher,” Lawrence said. “I should be able to pay for a house on a teacher’s salary.”

Lawrence has voted for Trump in the past but didn’t in 2024. For Ohio’s Senate race, Lawrence said he is torn and not sure whether to pick Democrat Sherrod Brown or Republican Jon Husted.

Still, even if the politicians say they will lower prices, Lawrence said, he won’t believe them.

“Trump said that, and it didn’t happen,” he said.

About the Poll

The KFF-AP Rural Voters Survey was conducted online and by telephone Aug. 12-24, 2026, among 2,241 registered voters living in rural areas, defined as census tracts that fall within codes 5-10 of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2020 Rural-Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) codes. Voters were reached through a combination of the probability-based SSRS Opinion Panel and a registration-based sample from the L2 voter file. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, including design effects due to weighting. Error margins are larger for subgroups. In collaboration with the AP, KFF researchers worked to design the survey sample and questionnaire and analyze and report findings.

This report is from a collaboration between ��ýҕ�l Health News and The Associated Press.

This article first appeared on ��ýҕ�l Health News and is republished here under a .

Nursing Home Beds Are Becoming More Scarce

Paula Span — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The San Vicente de Paúl Nursing Home in the South Bronx hasn’t admitted a patient since December 2024. ArchCare, which operates the facility, has reduced its capacity from 120 available beds to 53 and plans to shrink it further.

Another ArchCare nursing home, on Staten Island, has shut down a full floor. North of the city, in Dutchess County, its Ferncliff Nursing Home has contracted from 309 available beds to 196.

The eight nursing homes owned by ArchCare, a nonprofit that provides eldercare through the Archdiocese of New York, have 269 fewer usable beds than they did 18 months ago, a nearly 12% decline, creating waiting lists for patients seeking long-term care.

Across New York state, 24 nursing homes have closed since 2020, resulting in a loss of more than 3,000 licensed beds, according to LeadingAge New York, which represents nonprofit senior living organizations.

That mirrors . In 2015, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services certified 15,648 nursing facilities. A decade later, that number had fallen by more than 900.

With the oldest baby boomers turning 80 this year, an age when the need for long-term care climbs sharply, researchers are sounding alarms. Will there be enough nursing home beds for a rapidly graying nation?

“We’re seeing a serious problem and it’s heading in the wrong direction,” said David Grabowski, a health policy researcher at Harvard Medical School. He is an author of a study in JAMA Internal Medicine that in national nursing home capacity from 2019 to 2024. “As you look at the demographics, this is only going to get worse, maybe a lot worse,” he said, especially given looming Trump administration policies on immigration and Medicaid financing.

The reasons for the shrinkage?

ArchCare blames inadequate state reimbursement for Medicaid, a perennial industry complaint. The primary payer for nursing home care, Medicaid provides less than the daily cost of care, said Clif Porter, chief executive of the American Health Care Association, an industry trade group.

“Before the pandemic and inflation, the losses were sustainable,” said Jason Hutchens, ArchCare’s chief operating officer. More recently, he said, “we were running at an unsustainable loss — we had no choice.”

Nursing homes, , try to compensate by attracting short-stay patients covered by Medicare, which pays higher rates than Medicaid. When they can’t, “unless you’re extremely rapacious or extremely efficient, you’re not going to make it,” said Vincent Mor, a health services researcher at the Brown University School of Public Health who is an author of an article, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, about reduced capacity. “The numbers don’t add up.”

Staff shortages, which have plagued nursing homes for decades, have also caused contractions and closures. Nursing home aides work stressful, low-paying jobs with historically high turnover rates. Their median hourly wage last year was $20.67, according to , a research and advocacy group for direct care workers. Although pay has risen over the past decade, about 40% of nursing home aides rely on some form of public assistance, such as Medicaid or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, PHI reported.

The number of nursing home aides has rebounded from the covid pandemic, according to PHI, but fewer are working than in 2015. And while hiring and retention have improved, Porter said, “there’s still a significant gap between demand, especially future demand, and where the workforce currently is.”

National occupancy rates, which fell sharply during the pandemic, have returned to a more typical 80%.

That figure can be misleading; it doesn’t mean 1 bed in 5 sit empty, awaiting a patient. Occupancy counts state-licensed beds, but the more meaningful number is operating beds — how many are actually available depending on a facility’s staffing and other factors.

That number is usually lower and, in many cases, sinking. The American Health Care Association reported in 2024 that almost half of nursing homes were and 57% had waiting lists for new residents.

It’s possible, of course, that they also face financial losses because of lower demand. “Nursing homes close because people don’t want to go to nursing homes,” said Sam Brooks, director of public policy for the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, an advocacy group. “The quality is so low that people avoid them like the plague.”

Last year, Medicare inspectors found at least one quality violation serious enough to harm or jeopardize residents in 27% of nursing homes, according to an analysis by KFF, a health information nonprofit.

In recent decades alternatives emerged that diverted patients from nursing homes. About a million older adults currently live in assisted living facilities. And among Medicaid recipients, the ongoing policy shift called “rebalancing” has enabled more people to receive services at home () rather than in nursing homes.

In 1988, only 10% of Medicaid expenditures for long-term services went to home- or community-based services; the rest paid for institutional care. By 2020, more than 60% of expenditures funded home and community care, said Priya Chidambaram, a KFF senior policy manager specializing in Medicaid, citing a staff analysis.

How big a problem these trends pose depends partly on geography. The decline in the number of nursing homes in rural locations — about 10% from 2015 to 2025 — than the national drop of about 6%.

“It’s more difficult to staff a rural nursing home,” Chidambaram said. “Labor pools are smaller, and it’s hard to get people to take lower-paid or part-time jobs if they have to travel long distances.”

Bed shortages are also creating bottlenecks at hospitals. Where nursing home capacity declined, Grabowski’s team found, patients stayed in hospitals longer because they couldn’t locate posthospital care. They often had to travel farther to find facilities. “It gums up the entire system,” Grabowski said.

On two fronts, Trump administration policies could make matters worse, experts said. Revoking legal status for certain immigrant groups .

So far, “we’re not seeing significant impact across the country,” Porter said. But the effects are being felt in specific locations, including Florida, New York, and Massachusetts, he confirmed. With further revocations and deportations, “a lot fewer older adults are going to have caregivers,” Grabowski said.

The administration’s more than $900 billion in cuts to Medicaid over a decade are also expected to exact a toll. As states grapple with reduced funding, analysts expect home and community services to take a greater initial hit than institutional care. But that could increase pressure on nursing homes if patients who lose home care turn to institutions instead.

Less of these services “means more nursing home entry,” Grabowski said.

As policy ideas circulate — with calls for better data tracking, special visas for immigrant health workers, and targeted grants for nursing homes serving high-cost populations — researchers, advocates, and families are waiting to see what unfolds.

“So much of this is speculative,” Chidambaram said. “We don’t know what states will decide. We don’t know how the market will react. We’re in new territory here.”

The New Old Age is produced through a partnership with .

This article first appeared on ��ýҕ�l Health News and is republished here under a .

It’s Hard To Predict Who Will Be Suicidal. It’s Easier To Ensure People Can’t Shoot Themselves.

Aneri Pattani — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.”

Paul Nestadt is about as steeped in suicide prevention as a person can be.

He treats suicidal patients as a psychiatrist, has co-authored scores of research papers on how and why people kill themselves, and teaches graduate courses on the subject.

But he’ll be the first to admit: “I can’t tell you which of my patients is likely to die by suicide in the next six months.”

Almost nobody can.

predictions of who will be suicidal are only slightly better than a coin toss. And they haven’t improved over 50 years.

But that doesn’t make Nestadt hopeless. Instead, it pushes him to pursue interventions that don’t require pinpointing people at risk.

Chief among them: making it harder for people to carry out the act of killing themselves.

“Instead of asking every doctor to figure out which patient will die by suicide and locking that patient up, it might be that we need to make sure there aren’t loaded guns available,” Nestadt said.

In an ongoing series, ��ýҕ�l Health News is examining approaches to suicide prevention that expand beyond providing people at risk with medication and therapy. Although those are lifesaving measures, many clinicians, researchers, and people who have lost loved ones to suicide agree that more is needed. The challenge is that when it comes to firearms, broad policy approaches quickly become constitutionally complicated and politically polarizing.

Research shows that limiting access to lethal means is one of to save lives. It can involve on buildings to prevent people from jumping, as well as someone can buy or be prescribed at once.

And .

“That’s the one that will save the most lives,” said Nestadt, medical director at the Johns Hopkins Center for Suicide Prevention.

It may also be the most difficult to achieve.

killed themselves with a gun last year, representing more than half of all suicide deaths in the U.S., according to preliminary federal data. Even as overall suicide rates have dipped recently, gun suicides have hit record highs for five years in a row.

Most Gun Deaths in the U.S. Are Suicides

From 2021 to 2025, suicide deaths by gun hit record highs each year, even as homicides by gun decreased.

Source: CDC WONDER
Note: 2025 data is provisional. The following ICD-10 codes identify firearm death types: X93-95 (homicide), X72-X74 (suicide), W32-34, Y22-24, and Y35.0 (other, which includes accident, legal intervention, and undetermined).
Credit: Aneri Pattani/��ýҕ�l Health News

Many of the deaths are among , two groups that have had high suicide rates for years. But more recently, gun suicides have risen among and among some and men. Researchers say a during the covid pandemic underscores the need for prevention efforts that can be applied widely.

Some people assume it’s futile to restrict access to bridges, pills, or guns. The thinking goes: Those who want to kill themselves will simply find another way.

But . Creating barriers for one method doesn’t typically push people to another.

Suicide risk can surge quickly, with people spending or even five minutes between deciding to die and acting on it. Anything that delays such action — for example, having to unlock a safe to access a gun — gives them time to reconsider or for someone to intervene.

A Sharp Rise in Gun Suicides Among Black Women

White women had the highest rates of gun suicides by women in 2015 and 2024, but among women of other races and ethnicities, the increase was faster and steeper over that time.

Source: The Firearm Mortality Epidemic: Examining the U.S. Data From 2024, Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions
Note: Rates represent gun suicide deaths per 100,000 people.
Credit: Aneri Pattani/��ýҕ�l Health News

However, in the U.S., discussion around guns — even in the context of a traditionally bipartisan topic such as suicide prevention — is a political lightning rod. Mentions of background checks, waiting periods, or red flag laws often send people running to their respective corners. Gun owners and the firearm industry say many of the policies suicide prevention advocates seek threaten their Second Amendment rights, and many policymakers see the topic as a nonstarter.

President Donald Trump has been a of gun owners. His administration has dozens of firearms regulations and rescinded a previous that called gun violence a public health crisis. It has also revoked grants focused on and working on the issue.

The White House did not respond to specific questions about how these actions may affect the nation’s high rate of gun suicides or what it’s doing to prevent such deaths. But spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement that “President Trump is committed to Making America Healthy Again and that includes mental health.” She pointed to the administration’s for mental illness and an announcement of for veteran suicide prevention.

The Limits of Red Flag Laws

One gun policy that has gained some traction, , is the , more commonly known as a red flag law.

Adopted in some form in , these laws allow judges to temporarily remove a person’s guns when evidence suggests they pose a danger to themself or others.

Although such laws are often passed in the wake of , they’re more effective at preventing suicide.

Still, they require identifying someone at risk.

Someone like Dorothy Paugh’s dad.

In 1965, when Paugh was a young girl, her dad lost his job. He was distressed, not knowing how he’d support his wife and five children, Paugh said. He reviewed his life insurance policy, told his wife where he kept important documents, and bought a handgun.

“If my mom had been able to get an extreme risk protection order or if Dad’s best friend had asked to hold his gun for a while, maybe my dad would not have shot himself. He might have lived,” Paugh said.

Decades later, Paugh in Maryland and sat in the legislative gallery when the measure was passed.

She believes the law is saving lives.

across show that for every 10 to 20 guns removed under red flag laws, one suicide is averted, .

But Paugh also recognizes the law’s limitations.

“It wouldn’t have saved my son,” she said.

Dorothy Paugh’s father died by suicide in 1965. She lost her 25-year-old son, Peter, shown in the photo, to suicide in 2012. Both men shot themselves. Paugh has since become an advocate for gun policies that have been shown to reduce suicide deaths, such as red flag laws and mandatory waiting periods before completing a gun purchase. (C. Allen Paugh)

Her 25-year-old son, Peter, . He’d recently bought a house with his girlfriend and hosted a birthday celebration for his brother. He’d purchased a gift ahead of Mother’s Day — five novels by Charles Dickens, Paugh’s favorite author — that Paugh received after .

Unlike in her father’s case, Paugh said, no one saw warning signs for Peter. “I did not know that my son was suicidal. I didn’t have a clue,” she said. Even if a red flag law existed then, she wouldn’t have thought to use it.

The people most vulnerable to firearm suicide usually aren’t identified as such by family members or clinicians, said , a clinical psychologist and the executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center.

Studies have shown that among people who die by suicide, those who used guns were less likely to have in the past. And most veterans and service members who die by gun suicide about their suicidal thoughts in the months leading to their death.

That’s why red flag laws are just a first step in suicide prevention, Anestis said. They target specific individuals at high risk — the aspect that makes such laws more politically palatable — but they do not apply to the many other people who are quietly suicidal.

Paugh’s son, Peter, fatally shot himself in 2012. Paugh says she didn’t see warning signs that he was suicidal. Peter is pictured here hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2009. (Dorothy Paugh)

Lessons From Road Safety

Nestadt, the Johns Hopkins psychiatrist, said the nation needs to approach suicide prevention the way it approaches car accidents.

“You’re not trying to figure out who’s at risk of an accident” by testing people’s reaction time or cataloging who gets into fender benders, Nestadt said.

Instead, speed limits, passed seat belt laws, and required auto manufacturers to install air bags and shatter-resistant windshields. The significantly.

Applying a similar strategy to suicide might involve requiring permits and background checks to buy a gun, as well as instituting before completing the purchase.

found that enacting a permit-to-purchase law in Connecticut was associated with a roughly 15% decrease in gun suicide rates, while repealing such a law in Missouri was linked to a 16% increase in firearm suicide rates.

Most Suicides in America Involve a Gun

Suicide deaths by gun have been increasing for several years, even as suicides by suffocation — the second most common method — have been decreasing.

Source: CDC WONDER
Note: 2025 data is provisional. "All other methods combined" includes cut/pierce, drowning, fall, fire/flame, other land transport, other, and unspecified.
Credit: Aneri Pattani/��ýҕ�l Health News

About have enacted laws requiring owners to lock up their guns in homes where children live, a practice shown to . That’s an issue of particular importance, with 245% among Black youths and 98% among Latino youths since 2014.

Anestis said laws requiring permits and safe storage can also reduce homicides and other gun injuries.

Those types of violence not only hurt people directly but also increase their risk of suicide. people who are exposed to gun violence in their community experience trauma and become habituated to the idea of injury or death. That “double whammy” makes them more likely to kill themselves, Anestis said.

Responsibility, Rights, and Saving Lives

Gun owners and firearm trade associations generally oppose universal measures, such as requiring permits and waiting periods. They prefer education campaigns that teach people how to recognize warning signs, talk about mental health, and safely store guns — initiatives that place .

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, which represents the firearms industry, has partnered with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to create to be posted in gun shops.

“Our purpose is to provide educational materials to the firearm-owning community on how to help prevent suicide and save lives,” Bill Brassard, the NSSF’s senior director of suicide prevention initiatives, said in a statement.

The National Rifle Association said policies focused on guns miss deeper concerns that make someone suicidal, such as mental illness.

“Suicide is a serious issue that deserves serious solutions focused on the underlying causes, not on political efforts to restrict the rights of law-abiding Americans,” NRA spokesperson Justin Davis said in a statement. “A truly dangerous individual needs to be incapacitated, not just deprived of one particular means of harm.”

Some initiatives have managed to bring together unlikely bedfellows — gun store owners, public health experts, and even libraries — to to secure firearms at home, identify locations that will while they’re in crisis, and educate people on how to .

Those efforts give Paugh hope and fuel her passion to continue advocating for better mental health care, open conversations about suicide, and policies that decrease access to guns.

“It’s not a cure-all,” Paugh said of those policies. But “it does save lives.”

Having lost a parent and a child, she knows how valuable that can be.

“If you’re that one person or that person’s family, it’s all the difference in the world,” she said.

This article first appeared on ��ýҕ�l Health News and is republished here under a .

Southern Bureau Archives - �������ýҕ�l Health News

Rural MAHA Followers Say Trump Health Policies Haven’t Reached Their Communities

These 100 Nursing Homes Face Perilous Flood Risk. Minnesota Shows What Can Happen.

US Poised To Boot Legal Immigrants From Medicaid, Including Refugees and Sex-Trafficking Victims

In California Governor’s Race, Voters Face Stark Choice on Immigrant Healthcare

After Failed Execution, Health Workers Say State’s Rules Flout Medical Ethics

Republicans and Democrats Find a Unifying Target: Pharmacy Benefit Managers

Abortion Is on the Ballot Again as Post-Roe Policies Continue To Evolve

Black Lung Disease Remains a Threat, but Federal Officials Delay Effort To Address It

Economic Frustration Tests Trump’s Standing With Rural Voters, New KFF-AP Poll Finds

Nursing Home Beds Are Becoming More Scarce

It’s Hard To Predict Who Will Be Suicidal. It’s Easier To Ensure People Can’t Shoot Themselves.

Southern Bureau Archives - ��ýҕ�l Health News