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Axios
3 days ago
- Health
- Axios
California LGBTQ+ youth lose suicide hotline support
The Trump administration is removing suicide counselors for LGBTQ+ youth from the 988 crisis hotline. Why it matters: Those kids already face barriers to mental health care in California. President Trump is targeting a group that is more than four times as likely than its peers to attempt suicide. Driving the news: Starting July 17, callers will no longer be connected to the Trevor Project 's specialized hotline, because the service ran out of congressionally directed funding, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. The hotline's general services will remain available. What they're saying: "This is devastating, and we fear there will be compounding consequences. It is intentionally cruel for this to happen during Pride month," said Lance Toma, CEO of the San Francisco Community Health Center. Zoom in: The San Francisco metro area is home to the highest concentration of LGBTQ+ people in the U.S., per 2021 Williams Institute estimates. Stunning stat: 35% of LGBTQ+ young people in California, including 39% of transgender and nonbinary youth, seriously considered suicide in the past year, according to a 2024 survey by The Trevor Project. Both figures are slightly lower than the nationwide statistics. Between the lines: As some providers scale back services for LGBTQ+ youth, Toma told Axios that his organization will continue to provide gender-affirming medical care, case management and mental health services through their drop-in clinic TransThrive, and housing support via the Taimon Booton Navigation Center. "Right now, LGBTQ+ youth need to know they are not alone. They belong. And we are fighting for them," Toma said. State of play: California lands near the middle of the pack when it comes to using 988, which launched in 2022 to help address America's mental health crisis. By the numbers: California saw a rate of 25.5 contacts per 1,000 people last year, making it the 21st-highest in the nation, per new research published in JAMA Network Open. The national average was 23.7. Alaska (45.3) and Vermont (40.2) had the highest 988 contact rates among states in 2024, while Delaware (12.5) and Alabama (14.4) had the lowest.
India Today
02-06-2025
- India Today
Video: 4 on bike killed in deadly SUV crash on UP highway, riders flung into air
An SUV collided with a motorcycle on the Gorakhpur-Varanasi National Highway in Uttar Pradesh, killing all four individuals on the two-wheeler. All four were on a single bike when it was hit by a Grand Vitara, causing two of them to be flung into the air while the other two were dragged on the bonnet for about 100 meters before the vehicle came to a stop, according to eyewitnesses, police and the CCTV footage accessed by India Today the CCTV footage, the four friends seated on an Apache motorcycle are seen overtaking a tractor before an SUV coming from the Gorakhpur side collides with them. At the point of impact, two were flung a few meters into the air before landing on the road. The driver subsequently fled the scene and has yet to be caught. Among the four deceased, Rahul was set to be engaged on June 1, while his friend Arvind had returned from Bangkok just a week ago. The others included Sunil, a father of two daughters, and Pradeep. Following the incident that occurred at around 9:50 am on Sunday, locals rushed the four individuals to a nearby Community Health Center (CHC) where Pradeep, Sunil, and Arvind were declared dead on arrival. Rahul was referred to the district hospital but succumbed to his injuries on the way. The four friends were on their way back home when the accident Rahul's body arrived at his home amid preparations for his engagement. Rahul, an only child, was scheduled to get married few days after his engagement ceremony on June police have registered a case against the missing driver and the bodies have been sent for postmortem. An investigation is currently underway.
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
WATCH: Non-profit organization among those to discuss ‘threats to Medicaid funding' during news conference
BATON ROUGE, La. (Louisiana First) — A news conference about Medicaid funding and more is happening on Tuesday, May 27, in Baton Rouge. Elected officials, Community Health Center leaders, and the Louisiana Primary Care Association are gathering at 1 p.m. on the steps of the Louisiana State Capitol. Organizers announced they plan to voice their concerns regarding threats to Medicaid funding and other challenges that aim to disrupt Louisiana's healthcare safety net. Louisiana First News will livestream the news conference in the video player above. New report details 'overreach' of state government during pandemic Celebrate Pride Month with events in, near Baton Rouge: Drag brunch, music, festivals WATCH: Non-profit organization among those to discuss 'threats to Medicaid funding' during news conference WATCH: Florida officer rescues missing girl with autism found near water President Trump honors fallen soldiers on Memorial Day NPR sues Trump over order to cut funding Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
In southeast Kansas, housing is treated as health care, and people are getting off the streets
Pittsburg resident Stevie Perez reflects on her years experiencing homelessness and addiction that came to an end when she and her now-husband Brandon found stable housing, which was key to addressing their health, employment and goals. (Anna Kaminski/Kansas Reflector) In partnership with Public Health Watch, a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom focused on public health inequities, Kansas Reflector is examining the overlap between housing and health as rates of homelessness continue to rise and access to affordable health care remains out of reach. PITTSBURG — Stevie and Brandon Perez could not stay awake any longer. They found two chairs in Mercy Hospital's intensive care unit waiting room, a place they knew would be open, and they drifted off. Around 1 a.m., a hospital staff member shook them awake: 'You guys gotta go.' It was time to move again, but this time would be the last. They were serious. Stevie and Brandon mostly walked around at night. They would stay with friends, sleep in people's yards or camp in public places, sometimes in the shelter of playground equipment. 'It was,' Stevie said, then paused. 'It was. It was very degrading.' They were sick and tired of living on the streets. Cold winters. Glares and murmurs from other residents of Pittsburg. Drug addiction. It had become unbearable. It had become life-threatening. In southeast Kansas, which is home to the highest poverty rates in the state, collaborative solutions tailored to the needs of the community have proven successful in addressing homelessness and in shrinking uninsured rates for people like Stevie and Brandon. These programs act as safety nets for people whom traditional systems leave behind. The Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas is one of those safety nets, expanding the definition of health care to consider every aspect of a person's life, including housing. Stevie and Brandon, at the time they were homeless, fell into what health care advocates call the coverage gap, which includes the more than 240,000 Kansans who are uninsured because of unaffordable health insurance. The gap is especially prominent in the 10 states, including Kansas, that haven't expanded Medicaid to include low-income adults without children or disabilities. A parent or caretaker living in a two-person household and making more than $8,100 a year is ineligible for Medicaid in Kansas. The state spends about $10,000 on each of its roughly 427,000 Medicaid patients each year, but as congressional Republican leaders look to cut federal funding for the program, its future here is uncertain, and advocates fear more people could lose coverage. About one-third of people in the U.S. who have experienced a bout of homelessness in their lifetime relied on Medicaid, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found. In Kansas, relying on Medicaid is nearly impossible. People who experience homelessness, particularly those who don't stay in a shelter like Stevie and Brandon, often have unmet health needs and are more likely to have chronic diseases, serious mental health challenges or substance use disorders. Without housing or income, health care is often out of reach. That's especially true when health care for those with housing and income can be unaffordable and inaccessible. 'The stability of the place came first,' Stevie said. 'Then we got better physically and mentally.' Recovering from drug addiction and a persistent pain in her side, which she suspects is from the years of drug use and living outside, only could be addressed once she had a stable place to sleep. Then came the job, 'and then it was like, sky's the limit,' she said. Stevie, 43, was born and raised in Pittsburg, a daughter to a well-off family who took a wrong turn, as she describes it. She is a former pageant kid, which remains evident in her bouncy personality and constant smile. Optimism and gratitude are part of almost every breath, even as she confronts the side effects of homelessness, including rebuilding relationships with her three children. The first time Becky Gray, the executive director of Building Health Inc. in Pittsburg, met Stevie was at a temporary overnight shelter. 'I was walking in and she held the door open for me,' Gray said. 'I said, 'How are you doing?' ' 'I'm three days sober,' Stevie told her. 'And she hasn't come back,' Gray said. Building Health, a subsidiary of the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas, was designed specifically with the relationship between housing and health in mind. 'Housing is health care,' Gray said, 'and oftentimes homelessness is preceded by poor health.' Sometimes it causes it. People experiencing homelessness — particularly those living in cars, encampments or makeshift shelters — are at a higher risk of contracting infectious and noninfectious diseases, including HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis C, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They also often face mental illness, alcohol and substance use disorder, diabetes, and heart and lung disease. Homelessness and its side effects shorten a person's life expectancy by more than 17 years. Since the 2010 Affordable Care Act authorized Medicaid expansion for low-income adults, experts identified unhoused populations as a group that could benefit from expanded coverage and, in turn, improve public health outcomes. In recent years, the federal government, for the first time, allowed states to use up to 3% of their Medicaid budgets toward specific housing-related services, cementing the link between housing and health. But states have to opt to do so. Homelessness in Kansas reached its highest number in a decade in 2024, with more than 2,500 people experiencing homelessness on any given night, according to data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Stagnant wages and increasing housing costs have catapulted homelessness numbers in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic. Building Health was formed in 2020 and is just beginning to get off the ground. Gray has a 15-year plan full of meaningful solutions that enable the community to track new housing units and effects on health outcomes in certain areas. With funding from the federal government and a local philanthropic foundation, the project, dubbed 'The Station,' will include 10 rental units for people exiting homelessness with supportive services and an adult education center. 'Our homeless program managers are currently designing courses so that when people who are homeless come into our program, we can, in addition to their housing goals, adjust some of their education and employment goals as well,' Gray said. That includes a model kitchen to prepare people for hospitality jobs and basic courses on how to set up an email account and create a digital calendar. The $4 million project also plans to fund street outreach and access to showers, lockers, laundry machines, telehealth visits and mental health care. Kansas is at a point, in Gray's mind, where large-scale change is possible. That's because statewide organizations have shifted from competition to collaboration, Gray said. Pittsburg is operating as a pilot program, meaning its approach to addressing homelessness is set to be replicated across the state. Of the more than 443,000 Kansans on Medicaid, 32% of children and 11% of adults live in rural communities, according to the American Hospital Association. Rural areas contain about a third of the state's population. Uninsured rates across the state vary, with higher percentages in rural and impoverished areas. The portion of the state's population without health insurance plateaued at around 8.5%, beginning in 2022. Crawford County, where Pittsburg is the largest city with around 20,000 people, has been able to reverse its uninsured rate, despite having one of the highest poverty rates in the state. In 2010, nearly 22% of residents were uninsured. That number shrank to roughly 16% in 2020 and is now around 12%. The Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas offers care to the region regardless of a patient's ability to pay. The center is one example among several rural solutions across the state, filling in the coverage gap and turning the tide of generational poverty by fostering healthier communities. Stevie, a patient at the center, calls it a one-stop shop. 'They'll go out of their way to make sure you get what you need done,' she said. 'They also facilitate everything out there.' That includes housing help, clothing, transportation, legal assistance and education. The health center's headquarters in Pittsburg sit on the grounds of a former hospital run by the Sisters of St. Joseph, who cared for the town's miners at little to no cost beginning in 1903. The health center has grown since then into a multimillion-dollar nonprofit receiving grants from the federal government. Its 1,000 employees serve 85,000 patients a year across almost 20 locations in 10 counties in southeast Kansas and northeast Oklahoma. With one foot in the city's history and another in its future, the health center's leaders have grappled with how to confront disproportionate levels of poverty and poor health outcomes. The center's board of directors realized that only about 30% of a person's health is affected by what happens in an exam room, said Jason Wesco, president of the health center. Health care providers can't solve a lifetime of problems in one visit, or even a series of visits, he said. 'I want our providers to feel like they matter and they're making progress, and often they don't, because the problems we're trying to solve have taken 150 years to happen,' he said. So he began asking questions about how to house people, create infrastructure for transportation and provide food — the other 70% of a patient's health. 'At the core of all that is a belief that all this matters,' Wesco said, 'that there aren't throwaway communities, and there aren't throwaway people.' At the same time, Wesco tries to cut through the politics of the decidedly political issues of homelessness and affordable, accessible health care. 'I think we waste an awful lot of time blaming, and I think that gets left behind,' Wesco said. 'And I think rural communities have this really unique opportunity to solve problems quickly.' Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, has proposed Medicaid expansion each of her seven years in office. The Republican-led Legislature has blocked the proposal every year. Despite the unpopularity of potential federal Medicaid cuts and the popularity of Medicaid expansion among Kansas residents, Republican leaders continue to demonize the program. House Speaker Dan Hawkins, a Wichita Republican, applauded the prospect of massive federal cuts. 'For years, we have said that expanding Medicaid beyond those who truly need it will jeopardize the program, and now here we are,' Hawkins said in a May 5 press release. 'Our country cannot continue spending money like drunken sailors.' If Kansas lawmakers were to adopt Medicaid expansion, nearly 150,000 adults and children would gain coverage, and the state would have access to an additional $650 million in federal funding each year, according to a 2023 estimate. Since December 2023, Stevie and Brandon have been drug-free and off the streets. They married in March 2024, then moved into an apartment two months later with rental help from a charitable organization as they built up their income from working at a local fried chicken restaurant. Stevie obtained health insurance from the private marketplace with an affordable plan that is tailored to lower-income earners who can't qualify for Medicaid. After five years of waiting for public housing assistance, Stevie and Brandon now have subsidized rent, which means they can build up their credit, keep their bills paid and look toward the future. For Stevie, that could mean owning a home or a career change that puts her college degrees to use, she said. In her free time, she volunteers at a local food bank called Wesley House, which once functioned as a homeless shelter where Stevie spent the night. 'The thing is that they've all seen me at my lowest,' she said, 'and now they're all seeing me, like, blossoming.' This story is part of 'Uninsured in America,' a collaborative project led by Public Health Watch that focuses on life in America's health-coverage gap and states that haven't expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Va. lawmaker's federal PEER Support Act aims to bolster recovery specialists
The U.S. Capitol is shown on March 14, 2024. (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom) As someone with the lived experience of battling addiction — to include the criminal record that often goes hand in hand with the disease — Rachel Alderman is among the best-suited people to help others cope. Alderman is a peer recovery specialist and community health worker at the Community Health Center of the New River Valley, where she helps people overcome drug addiction. Lately, she's felt a fresh sense of pride in her role, since new federal and state efforts to support these types of mental health workers have made headway. But it's often been challenging for professionals like her to land their dream job because it's common for people coping with substance use disorders to have also entered the criminal justice system. Then their past convictions, time-served, probation status or fines still owed can prevent them from obtaining many types of jobs. In Alderman's case, her possession charges could have prevented her from working in the field, if not for law changes and permissive employers. While private or nonprofit organizations have been able to more freely hire people with certain criminal records, state or federal-funded facilities often can't. Virginia state lawmakers have chipped away at some of these barriers over the years and U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, now hopes to support those efforts nationwide. Peer recovery specialists like Alderman interface directly with patients and collaborate with clinical social workers or medical officers to help patients address their physical and mental health while they try to overcome their addiction. Alderman always had an interest in working in the mental health field, but her struggles with substance use disorder held her back. When she was seeking care from clinicians, she said it was a visit with a peer recovery specialist who helped her both recover and realize her professional pathway was still possible. 'I knew my clinicians cared about me. I knew that they wanted to see me get better, but they didn't really get (how addiction feels). And then this guy comes in, and somehow he's figured it out,' Alderman explained. 'So I'm like 'Well he did it, so maybe I'll listen to his suggestions that I might have been hard-headed against at first.'' This week, Kaine and Indiana Republican Sen. Jim Banks introduced the Providing Empathetic and Effective Recovery (PEER) Support Act. If it becomes law, it would direct the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as well as the U.S. Department of Justice to study states' screening processes for peer support specialists and examine which factors are barriers for certification or hiring. This matters, Kaine said, because not every state has taken the steps to reform that workforce the way that Virginia has. The bill would also direct the U.S. Office of Management and Budget to revise the Standard Operational Classification system to recognize peer support specialists as a profession to help ensure data reporting on the field. His bill is 'driven by conversations' he's had with his constituents around the state, Kaine said. 'It is only acts like this bill that hopefully will allow for these changes to be made,' said Michelle Brauns, Community Health Center of New River Valley's CEO. Kaine also suggested that he believes his bill can inspire more public esteem for the work peer support specialists do. 'Let's raise the respect for this profession,' Kaine said. Alderman said it could also boost respect for people recovering from addictions. 'We're often seen as less-than or not a whole person,' Alderman said. 'This kind of recognition on this kind of level really feels good.' While his efforts at the federal level can't overwrite the way states regulate their professionals, Kaine said that the PEER Act can help guide the way for states to rethink how they regulate peer recovery specialists. It's something Virginia has already been tackling. Del. Cia Price, D-Newport News, and Sen. Todd Pillion, R-Washington, passed legislation to prevent certain criminal convictions from barring people from peer recovery work. Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed their bills last year. Other barriers have also been addressed in the statehouse, such as a bill this year by Del. Katrina Callsen, D-Charlottesville, which t eliminates the need to have paid off any owed fines or fees to be considered for peer recovery jobs. Youngkin signed this bill, too. 'If you can't get a job that you're best-poised to do, how do we expect people to ever be able to pay?' Price said. Price also emphasized the racial disparities at play in the criminal justice system. She noted that people of color are more likely to have interactions with law enforcement, so people of color with substance use disorders are also more likely to serve time as a result of their disease. But the bipartisan work she and others have achieved in this space is something she wants to see continue. While Kaine has introduced his bill previously, he's said he is hopeful this time it will gain more traction and pass, particularly since it has bipartisan support from numerous cosponsors. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
