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The KFF/AP Rural Voters Survey examines the views and political priorities of voters living in rural areas across the United States ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The survey gauges rural voters' top election issues, growing struggles with cost of living and health care costs, as well as views on the Trump administration's health care policies.
Rural voters’ frustrations about the cost of living in their community are growing and appear to be chipping away at Republicans’ enthusiasm to vote as the midterm elections near, a new KFF/AP Survey of Rural Voters finds.
The 2025 budget reconciliation created the Rural Health Transformation Program, which will award $50 billion in state grants over a five-year period. This brief provides an overview of the program, describing its structure, how funds can be used, how funding compares to Medicaid spending reductions in the reconciliation law, and how the funds are being distributed across and within states.
Considering the existing challenges to hospital-based maternity care in rural areas and the potential for it to worsen, this data note analyzes the availability of hospitals providing inpatient maternity care in rural areas for Medicaid enrollees and illustrates how access to these services could be affected if additional rural hospitals were to close or eliminate those services.
State Medicaid and public health agencies both work to advance the health of their communities, often pursuing similar priorities and serving similar populations. This brief examines findings from KFF's 25th annual Medicaid budget survey, which asked state Medicaid directors about new or enhanced initiatives involving public health in FY 2025 or planned for FY 2026.
This analysis compares the characteristics of nursing homes in rural areas with those in urban areas. This brief uses data from Nursing Home Compare, a publicly available dataset that provides a snapshot of information on quality of care in each nursing home.
This issue brief explains why it can be misleading to compare the first year of Rural Health Transformation Program allocations with estimated Medicaid cuts, which will be implemented on a gradual basis and not fully take effect until 2027, after the rural health fund is exhausted.
Community health centers served more than 32 million patients in medically underserved urban and rural areas in 2024. This brief reports on health center patients, services, and financing in 2024, using national data from the Uniform Data System (UDS).
The Administration’s change to reimbursement for drug administration services represents a step forward in implementing site neutral payment reforms but is modest compared to some of the more sweeping options raised by MedPAC and others.
This analysis examines the recent growth of Medicare Advantage as a share of hospital inpatient days. Medicare Advantage rose from 13% to 25% of all inpatient days from 2015 to 2023, although there was wide variation among hospitals.
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