ACS CancerRisk360 is a web-based tool that assesses comprehensive cancer risk and offers personalized recommendations to empower individuals to reduce their cancer risk and improve overall health. This tool now has a new section with “Questions to Ask your Provider.”

The Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children announces the release of an exclusive, interactive series of 24 maps that show, in unprecedented local detail, how H.R. 1’s cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will affect health care access, food security, and economic well-being in every corner of the state.

As federal changes have begun to take effect, it is anticipated that deep cuts and eligibility changes to these critical programs will negatively affect children and their families, leading to the loss of health coverage and reduced food assistance.

In Pennsylvania and across the country:

• Medicaid is the single largest insurer of children. More than 1.1 million Pennsylvania children rely on Medicaid, or 40% of all children in the state.
• SNAP is the most extensive child anti-hunger program. Over 309,000 SNAP households in Pennsylvania include children, making kids among the most vulnerable to food assistance cuts.

The maps show impacts geographically by county and state House and Senate legislative districts.

Click here for the report and maps.

A new policy brief investigates the Importance of Long-Term Services and Supports to a High-Performance Rural Health System: Demographic, Policy and Economic Challenges.

The long-term services and supports (LTSS) system is an important element of a high performing rural health system. The purpose of this brief is to assess the potential for transforming the LTSS system while it faces considerable challenges driven by demographic, economic and policy forces. The policy forces include the potential impact of planned expenditure reductions to Medicaid over the 2026-2034 period, with intended as well as unintended effects.

Prepared by the RUPRI Health Panel: Alva O. Ferdinand, DrPh, JD; Mark Holmes, PhD; Alana D. Knudson, PhD; Jennifer P. Lundblad, PhD, MBA; A. Clinton MacKinney, MD, MS; Timothy D. McBride, PhD; and Keith J. Mueller, PhD (Chair)

Contact: Keith J. Mueller, PhD; keith-mueller@uiowa.edu, Chair, RUPRI Health Panel, University of Iowa College of Public Health, 1-319-384-3832

The Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) is a division within the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that conducts research, data analysis, and program evaluations to inform housing policy.

This report examines housing challenges that are unique to rural communities, such as affordability, the physical inadequacy of homes, homelessness, difficulty in aging in place, and disaster response and recovery.  The report also describes federal, state, local, and private policy efforts to address these challenges, with details on three rural housing initiatives states have implemented to spur development and boost home ownership. 

The Economic Research Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture updated Frontier and Remote (FAR) areas using information from the 2020 Census.  

This geographic classification, which was created as a collaboration between USDA’s Economic Research Service and the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy, are based on a combination of population size and travel time. There are four FAR levels, with Level 4 being the most remote.