The survey from RAND finds a sizeable drop in awareness from last year's highs.
The bill gained momentum as the pandemic put a spotlight on health care disparities and workforce shortages.
As the country faces the possibility of massive Medicaid cuts, a pair of experts and an ace Medicaid reporter offered tips on how to navigate the fast-developing story in our latest Health Matters webinar.
“We expected to find a larger difference between plans on and off the exchange,” said researcher Simon Haeder. “In both cases, it was very unlikely to get an appointment.”
Reporter Alayna Shulman profiles two women living with mental illness in rural northeast California, where services can be scarce. “You’ve just got to keep going, and you’ve just got to cling to the hope that things are going to get better," one woman says.
In communities without running water and flush toilets, 11 times more children develop pneumonia than other Alaskans, and some develop complications that can lead to lifelong respiratory problems.
What if you didn’t have piped water and sewer, and the government wasn’t picking up the tab to extend such resources to you in rural Alaska? How would you go about finding a low-cost system that you could keep running through the winter?
With high rates of many mental illnesses and not much money to treat them, are the rural counties of far-northern California destined for meager mental health services? What's lacking in these systems, and - perhaps more importantly - how did ones in similar areas overcome the same problems?
Rural and inner-city health facilities have been dealing with doctor shortages for years. One innovative approach has successfully attracted dedicated health professionals to rural Kansas and Iowa, and urban Memphis, and might provide clues for other communities facing a shortage.
Montana is a vast, frontier state with many small towns scattered in rural counties. A few of those counties don’t have a single doctor or even a pharmacy. For Montanans suffering with mental health issues, those distances can be especially devastating.
