News from rural America.

Cuts to Medicaid and frozen funding for broadband are both likely to have a negative impact on rural healthcare, which is already struggling. Plus, lawsuits over the mass firing of federal workers have huge implications for public lands.

TRANSCRIPT

For the Daily Yonder and Public News Service, this is the news from rural America.

Gaps in healthcare and spotty broadband can be a deadly combination in rural counties and contribute to three million Americans living sicker, shorter lives.

KFF health news reporter, Sarah Jane Tribble, says they live where doctors don't practice and telehealth can't make up the difference.

If you think about the promise of telehealth and being able to use virtual care, that promise doesn't work in these places.

Compared to cities, patients across the rural South, Appalachia and remote West often can't make a video call to their doctor or log into their patient portals.

She says that contributes to the health disparity between places like Howard County, Maryland, outside of Washington, DC, and Greene County in Alabama's Black Belt.

Folks there die on average 10 years younger than folks in sort of the leafy, wealthier county.

More than $42 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law was to go to expanding broadband this year, but that Biden-era program faces uncertainty and deep cost cutting.

The Trump administration is attacking it as full of quote, "woke mandates."

Medicaid cuts and Republican budget plans could also worsen rural healthcare.

Ilana Newman looked at one Colorado community.

More than a third of Montezuma County is enrolled in Medicaid, and it supports a quarter of the budget for the county seats hospital.

Joe Fine, CEO of Southwest Memorial in Cortez, says Medicaid reimbursements are lower than private insurance, but the other option is getting nothing.

If that same patient no longer has insurance and is unable to pay, we still take care of them, but now there's nothing coming in that's contributing to keeping all of those services.

The hospital employs 500 people, many with young families that support local institutions like the public schools.

The ripples of a hospital in a rural community are many beyond just the health and wellbeing of the people we serve today.

I'm Ilana Newman.

Conservationists are suing Elon Musk and Doge over the mass firings at the agencies that manage federal land and parks.

Sierra Club managing attorney Gloria Smith says visitor safety, wildlife protection, wildfire prevention, and maintenance in states like Arizona are at risk.

There's a lot of work that goes into making a park presentable and safe for the high season when millions and millions of people visit.

The National Weather Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been Musk's latest target.

The Smith says NOAA provides critical, free, real-time weather service data.

On a rafting trip, if there's a huge storm, then there are flash flood risks, for example.

The suits argue Musk was appointed and is acting illegally.

For the Daily Yonder and Public News Service, I'm Mary Sherman.

For more rural stories, visit dailyyonder.com.