内容摘要：THE FACTS: Pediatricians note there is no cure for measles: It is a virus that the body has to fight off on its own. The best way to protect against the risks of measles is to get vaccinated to lower the chance of contracting it.

THE FACTS: Pediatricians note there is no cure for measles: It is a virus that the body has to fight off on its own. The best way to protect against the risks of measles is to get vaccinated to lower the chance of contracting it.

“If the hospital didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be any physicians there,” Miller said. “There is no place to go and get a lab test except for that hospital. There may be no nursing home or place to get rehab or long-term care other than these hospitals.”When a hospital does stay open in a large rural area where few people live, the facility may not see the number of patients it would need to see to be profitable, said Arrianna Planey, who researches health policy and management at the University of North Carolina.

Leaders in Brownsville tried to find a buyer for the hospital. The county eventually purchased it. Braden Health, a privately held company, then took over the hospital with two conditions from the county supervisors: It must be a full-service hospital with a 24-hour emergency room and staff had to be hired as quickly as possible. Local officials say the hospital is breaking even.Tennessee is one of 10 states — many of them in the South — that haven’t expanded Medicaid. Michael Meit, the director of East Tennessee State University’s Center for Rural Health Research, believes doing so would be an obvious solution to the problem of growing rural health disparities. More people would be covered by insurance, Meit said, and hospitals could make more money.“They’re providing a lot of uncompensated care,” he said of rural health systems in those states.

Miller acknowledged that Medicaid expansion can help, but argued that pinning hopes on that alone has “let the private insurance plans off the hook.”“In some cases, the small hospitals are losing more money on private insurance than they are on Medicaid, which is really kind of remarkable,” he said, “but that’s how little they get paid ... by the private insurance plans.”

Low Medicaid reimbursements play a role in

, along with worker shortages and declining birth rates. More than half of rural hospitals have stopped offering labor and delivery services, another recent analysis from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform showed. That can lead to longer travel times and aIt was a full-circle moment for the midwife and patient, who first met when Mixon was an uninsured teenager seeking prenatal care halfway through her pregnancy with the little boy. Joseph has been on a decades-long mission to usher patients like Mixon safely into parenthood through a nonprofit that relies on best practices she learned in Europe, a place that experts say

“I consider maternal health to be in a state of emergency here,” said Joseph, a British immigrant. “It’s more than frustrating. It’s criminal.”The Biden administration,

in this election year, acknowledges the U.S. has one of the highest rates of any wealthy nation — hovering around 20 per 100,000 live births overall and 50 for Black moms, according to the World Health Organization and U.S. health officials. Several European countries have rates in the single digits.shows the vast majority of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable. Public health experts