The Department of Health and Human Services in late March canceled nearly 700 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grants nationwide — together worth about $11 billion. Awarded during the covid-19 pandemic, they supported efforts to vaccinate people, reduce health disparities among demographic groups, upgrade antiquated systems for detecting infectious disease outbreaks, and hire community health workers.

Initially, grant cancellations hit blue and red states roughly evenly. Four of the five jurisdictions with the largest number of terminated grants were led by Democrats: California, the District of Columbia, Illinois, and Massachusetts.

But after attorneys general and governors from about two dozen blue states sued in federal court and won an injunction, the balance flipped. Of the five states with the most canceled grants, four are led by Republicans: Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Ohio.

In blue states, nearly 80% of the CDC grant cuts have been restored, compared with fewer than 5% in red states, according to the KFF Health News analysis. Grant amounts reported in an HHS database known as the Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System, or TAGGS, often don’t match what states confirmed. Instead, this analysis focused on the number of grants.

The divide is an example of the polarization that permeates health care issues, in which access to safety-net health programs, abortion rights, and the ability of public health officials to respond to disease threats diverge significantly depending on the political party in power.

In an emailed statement, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said the agency “is committed to protecting the health of every American, regardless of politics or geography. These funds were provided in response to the COVID pandemic, which is long over. We will continue working with states to strengthen public health infrastructure and ensure communities have the tools they need to respond to outbreaks and keep people safe.”

The money in question wasn’t spent solely on covid-related activities, public health experts say; it was also used to bolster public health infrastructure and help contain many types of viruses and diseases, including the flu, measles, and RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus.

“It really supported infrastructure across the board, particularly in how states respond to public health threats,” said Susan Kansagra, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

The Trump cutbacks came as the U.S. recorded its largest measles outbreak in over three decades and 266 pediatric deaths during the most recent flu season — the highest reported outside of a pandemic since 2004. Public health departments canceled vaccine clinics, laid off staff, and put contracts on hold, health officials said in interviews.

After its funding cuts were blocked in court, California retained every grant the Trump administration attempted to claw back, while Texas remains the state with the most grants terminated, with at least 30. As the CDC slashed grants in Texas, its measles outbreak spread across the U.S. and Mexico, sickening at least 4,500 people and killing at least 16.

Colorado, which joined the lawsuit, had 11 grant terminations at first, but then 10 were retained. Meanwhile, its neighboring states that didn't sue — Wyoming, Utah, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma — collectively lost 55 grants, with none retained.

In Jackson, Ohio, a half-dozen community health workers came to work one day in March to find the Trump administration had canceled their grant five months early, leaving the Jackson County Health Department half a million dollars short — and them without jobs.

“I had to lay off three employees in a single day, and I haven’t had to do that before. We don’t have those people doing outreach in Jackson County anymore,” Health Commissioner Kevin Aston said.

At one point, he said, the funding helped 11 Appalachian Ohio counties. Now it supports one.

Marsha Radabaugh, one employee who was reassigned, has scaled back her community health efforts: She’d been helping serve hot meals to homeless people and realized that many clients couldn’t read or write, so she brought forms for services such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to their encampment in a local park and helped fill them out.

“We would find them rehab places. We’d get out hygiene kits, blankets, tents, zero-degree sleeping bags, things like that,” she said. As a counselor, she’d also remind people “that they're cared for, that they're worthy of being a human — because, a lot of the time, they're not treated that way.”

Sasha Johnson, who led the community health worker program, said people like Radabaugh “were basically a walking human 411,” offering aid to those in need.

Radabaugh also partnered with a food bank to deliver meals to homebound residents.

Aston said the abrupt way they lost the funds — which meant the county unexpectedly had to pay unemployment for more people — could have ruined the health district financially. Canceling funding midcycle, he said, “was really scary.”

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist and promoter of vaccine misinformation, has called the CDC a “cesspool of corruption.” At HHS, he has taken steps to undermine vaccination in the U.S. and abroad.

Federal CDC funding accounts for more than half of state and local health department budgets, according to KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. States that President Donald Trump won in the 2024 election received a higher share of the $15 billion the CDC allocated in fiscal 2023 than those that Democrat Kamala Harris won, according to KFF.

The Trump administration’s nationwide CDC grant terminations reflect this. More than half were in states that Trump won in 2024, totaling at least 370 terminations before the court action, according to KFF Health News’ analysis.

The Columbus, Ohio, health department had received $6.2 million in CDC grants, but roughly half of it — $3 million — disappeared with the Trump cuts. The city laid off 11 people who worked on investigating infectious disease outbreaks in such places as schools and nursing homes, Columbus Health Commissioner Mysheika Roberts said.

She also said the city had planned to buy a new electronic health record system for easier access to patients’ hospital records — which could improve disease detection and provide better treatment for those infected — but that was put on ice.

“We’ve never had a grant midcycle just get pulled from us for no reason,” Roberts said. “This sense of uncertainty is stressful.”

Columbus did not receive its money directly from the CDC. Rather, the state gave the city some funds it received from the federal government. Ohio, led by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and a Republican attorney general, did not sue to block the funding cuts.

Columbus sued the federal government in April to keep its money, along with other Democratic-led municipalities in Republican-governed states: Harris County, Texas, home to Houston; the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County in Tennessee; and Kansas City, Missouri. A federal judge in June blocked those cuts.

As of mid-August, Columbus was awaiting the funds. Roberts said the city won’t rehire staff because the federal funding was expected to end in December.

Joe Grogan, a senior scholar at the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Institute and former director of the White House Domestic Policy Council in Trump’s first term, said state and local agencies “are not entitled” to the federal money, which was awarded “to deal with an emergency” that has ended.

“We were throwing money out the door the last five years,” Grogan said of the federal government. “I don’t understand why there would ever be a controversy in unspent covid money coming back.”

Ken Gordon, Ohio Department of Health spokesperson, wrote in an email that the $250 million in grants lost had helped with, among other things, upgrading the disease reporting system and boosting public health laboratory testing.

Some of the canceled HHS funding wasn’t slated to end for years, including four grants to strengthen public health in Indian Country, a grant to a Minnesota nonprofit focused on reducing substance use disorders, and a few to universities about occupational safety, HIV, tuberculosis, and more.

Brent Ewig, chief policy and government relations officer for the Association of Immunization Managers, said the cuts were “the predictable result of ‘boom, bust, panic, neglect’ funding” for public health.

The association represents 64 state, local, and territorial immunization programs, which Ewig said will be less prepared to respond to disease outbreaks, including measles.

“The system is blinking red,” Ewig said.

Methodology

KFF Health News’ analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grants sought to answer four questions: 1) How many grants have been terminated in the U.S. under the Trump administration since March? 2) Which states saw the most grants cut? 3) What were the grants for? and 4) Did the grant terminations affect blue, red, and purple states differently? This follows a similar analysis by KFF Health News for an article on nationwide NIH grant terminations.

Our primary data source was a Department of Health and Human Services website showing grant terminations. We compared an initial list of grant terminations from April 3 with one from July 11 to determine how many grants had been restored. The USAspending.gov database helped us track grants by state.

To classify states politically, we followed the same steps from our April coverage of National Institutes of Health grant terminations. States were “blue” if Democrats had complete control of the state government or if the majority of voters favored Democratic presidential candidates in the last three elections (2016, 2020, 2024). “Red” states were classified similarly with respect to the Republican Party. “Purple” states had politically split state governments and/or were generally considered to be presidential election battleground states. The result was 25 red states, 17 blue states, and eight purple states. The District of Columbia was classified as blue using similar methods.

This analysis does not account for potential grant reinstatements in local jurisdictions where the funds were awarded indirectly rather than directly from the CDC; it accounts only for the recipients’ location, and excludes grants terminated from Compacts of Free Association states and other foreign entities that received grants directly from the CDC. At least 40 CDC grants were terminated that were meant for global health efforts or assisting public health activities in other nations following the Trump administration’s order for the CDC to withdraw support for the World Health Organization.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

The cuts are “just a little astonishing,” said Carole Johnson, who previously led the Health Resources and Services Administration. She left the agency in January with the administration change and has described the sweeping staff cuts as a “big threat” to the agency’s ability to distribute billions of dollars in grants to hospitals, clinics, nonprofits, and other organizations nationwide.

Since February, about a quarter of workers at HRSA — including analysts, auditors, scientists, grant managers, and nursing consultants — have left, according to a KFF Health News analysis.

The agency, headquartered in a nondescript gray-and-glass office building tucked into side streets in Rockville, Maryland, employed about 2,700 staffers in early 2025. Employees worked behind the scenes to manage and monitor thousands of projects nationwide that fund primary health providers, HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, maternal and child care programs, rural hospitals, and workforce training.

On the ground, HRSA’s grants have helped create telehealth initiatives for mothers in rural New Mexico, funded workforce training for Indigenous nurses in South Dakota, and supported Healthy Start programs for expectant mothers and babies in places like rural Georgia.

Ryan Alcorn, a co-founder and the chief executive of GrantExec, a company that helps organizations match and apply for funding, said every American benefits from the programs HRSA’s funding supports: “When the safety net fails, hospitals become overwhelmed, unpaid costs rise, and premiums go up for everyone.”

Several former HRSA leaders, who have been in touch with employees, confirmed the magnitude of the cuts estimated by KFF Health News. Johnson said she believes the actual number of workers lost is larger.

More than 700 workers were fired or chose to leave from February through the end of June. The analysis is based on data from the HHS employee directory, which may not include workers who opted out of being listed, and may not be an exact count of the worker roster, which is in flux.

Johnson, who is now a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, and several other former employees interviewed by KFF Health News said they are concerned that specific programs will be eliminated, but also that reduced staffing could affect ongoing program oversight. The agency’s workforce ethos, Johnson said, is one in which “if there were two people left at HRSA, they would work around the clock to try to get the money out.”

For at least one program, revealed during a tense moment on Capitol Hill in July, money to help low-income and minority students has already stopped flowing to colleges and universities. The Scholarship for Disadvantaged Students program, established through congressional legislation, helped schools pay for students to train to become dentists, physician assistants, midwives, and nurses — all of whom are in short supply in rural and some urban areas. Candice Chen, acting associate administrator of HRSA’s health workforce bureau, confirmed the agency “did have competitions that were canceled.”

When U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) asked whether they were canceled by the Trump administration, Chen paused before speaking again: “Well, the funding decisions were made across the administration.”

Asked about the canceled funding, officials from several schools declined to comment. Patrick Gonzales, a spokesperson for the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, said in an emailed statement that the school is “helping students navigate this transition with clarity and care.”

U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) has called for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s resignation or firing, “whichever one comes first,” saying there was “no defensible answer” to eliminating thousands of workers across federal agencies.

In April, nearly a dozen Democratic senators sent a letter to Kennedy demanding answers about the mass firings, noting HRSA is the “primary agency tasked with improving access to health care for vulnerable populations.”

HHS did not respond to the senators’ letter. Kennedy and the Department of Health and Human Services “has refused to answer basic questions about why the administration conducted mass firings in this office,” said Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.).

President Donald Trump’s proposed fiscal 2026 budget eliminates HRSA as well as some of its programs, including grants to rural hospitals, workforce training, Ryan White HIV/AIDS programs, and emergency medical services for children. HRSA spokesperson Andrea Takash said in an emailed response that HHS is “undertaking organizational changes that support multiple goals while ensuring continuity of essential services.”

HRSA continues to process new funding announcements and awards for the health centers, workforce programs, child and maternal health initiatives, and “many more of our critical programs and services,” Takash said.

HRSA’s largest bureau supports thousands of community health centers that serve over 31 million people nationwide. Before the end of September, the agency’s grants are still scheduled to pay out billions more to health clinics and other organizations nationwide.

Cuts to health centers could come under more scrutiny because their funding has “a lot of bipartisan” support, said Celli Horstman, a senior research associate at the Commonwealth Fund, a health research nonprofit. HRSA’s funding, which includes Section 330 grants, goes to “keeping the doors open” at federally qualified health centers nationwide, Horstman said.

An additional 42% of health center funding comes from Medicaid, a federal and state insurance program that covers people with low incomes and those with disabilities, she said. Congress recently voted to reduce Medicaid funding.

Joe Stevens, spokesperson for the Virginia Community Healthcare Association, said health centers are rethinking “how they do business” because of the Medicaid cuts and the increased administrative challenges faced when processing their HRSA grants, which have been more challenging to obtain since February. Virginia’s health clinics treat about 400,000 people annually, Stevens said.

“It’s a system that’s been in place for 50-plus years, and this is the first time they’re having issues receiving their funds,” he said, noting that clinics now must also provide an itemized list of how the money is to be used after grants have been approved.

“Our health centers are understaffed, so having somebody to have to enter that information every two weeks is just more time,” Stevens said.

For months, HRSA staff across all departments have worked through changes to their technology systems and transitioned work to others as employees left their jobs. Workers have continued to process grants despite an executive order that froze federal funding and a March announcement that HHS would lay off 10,000 workers and shut down entire agencies — including HRSA.

One former employee said that, at this point, “all we’re doing now is keeping the lights on.”

Michael Warren, who left the agency in June, ran HRSA’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau. Warren described the bureau’s staffing cuts as “substantial.” The bureau awarded more than $628 million in grants between Oct. 1, 2024, and July 22, 2025, to programs that included providing block grants to states and funding home visiting programs, through which trained staffers work with families with young children.

Warren, who is now the chief medical and health officer for the March of Dimes, said America faces a crisis as one of the “most dangerous places in the world to give birth among other high-income countries, and that shouldn’t be the case.”

With tears brimming, Warren said his former employees “wake up every morning, they work all day, and they go to sleep every night thinking about what they can do for mothers, children, and families.”

Methodology

For this article, KFF Health News calculated workforce reductions at the Health Resources and Services Administration using public information from the Department of Health and Human Services directory posted online. We compared the number and type of employees listed with HRSA in February to those in early July. Our employee totals exclude people listed as interns, fellows, student trainees, or volunteers. The directory is not an official count of HRSA employees, but it offers detailed snapshots of trends so far this year. Reporters also cross-checked the estimates with former employees.

We’d like to speak with current and former personnel from the Department of Health and Human Services or its component agencies who believe the public should understand what’s happening within the federal health bureaucracy. Please message KFF Health News on Signal at (415) 519-8778 or get in touch here.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

False and misleading narratives on social media, in news reports, and even in popular television dramas suggesting people can overdose from touching fentanyl — rather than ingesting it — are now informing policy and spending decisions.

In an episode of the CBS cop drama “Blue Bloods,” for instance, Detective Maria Baez becomes comatose after accidentally touching powdered fentanyl. In another drama, “S.W.A.T.,” Sgt. Daniel “Hondo” Harrelson warns his co-workers: “You touch the pure stuff without wearing gloves, say good night.”

While fentanyl-related deaths have drastically risen over the past decade, no evidence suggests any resulted from incidentally touching or inhaling it, and little to no evidence that any resulted from consuming it in marijuana products. (Recent data indicates that fentanyl-related deaths have begun to drop.)

There is also almost no evidence that law enforcement personnel are at heightened risk of accidental overdoses due to such exposures. Still, there is a steady stream of reports — which generally turn out to be false — of officers allegedly becoming ill after handling fentanyl.

“It’s only in the TV dramas” where that happens, said Brandon del Pozo, a retired Burlington, Vermont, police chief who researches policing and public health policies and practices at Brown University.

In fact, fentanyl overdoses are commonly caused by ingesting the drug illicitly as a pill or powder. And most accidental exposures occur when people who use drugs, even those who do not use opioids, unknowingly consume fentanyl because it is so often used to “cut” street drugs such as heroin and cocaine.

Despite what scientific evidence suggests about fentanyl and its risks, misinformation can persist in public discourse and among first responders on the front lines of the crisis. Daniel Meloy, a senior community engagement specialist at the drug recovery organizations Operation 2 Save Lives and QRT National, said he thinks of misinformation as “more of an unknown than it is an anxiety or a fear.”

“We’re experiencing it often before the information” can be understood and shared by public health and addiction medicine practitioners, Meloy said.

Some state and local governments are investing money from their share of the billions in opioid settlement funds in efforts to protect first responders from purported risks perpetuated through fentanyl misinformation.

In 2022 and 2023, 19 cities, towns, and counties across eight states used settlement funds to purchase drug detection devices for law enforcement agencies, spending just over $1 million altogether. Two mass spectrometers were purchased for at least $136,000 for the Greeley, Colorado, police department, “to protect those who are tasked with handling those substances.”

Del Pozo, the retired police chief, said fentanyl is present in most illicit opioids found at the scene of an arrest. But that “doesn’t mean you need to spend a lot of money on fentanyl detection for officer safety,” he said. If that spending decision is motivated by officer safety concerns, then it’s “misspent money,” del Pozo said.

Fentanyl misinformation is affecting policy in other ways, too.

Florida, for instance, has on the books a law that makes it a second-degree felony to cause an overdose or bodily injury to a first responder through this kind of secondhand fentanyl exposure. Similar legislation has been considered by states such as Tennessee and West Virginia, the latter stipulating a penalty of 15 years to life imprisonment if the exposure results in death.

Public health advocates worry these laws will make people shy away from seeking help for people who are overdosing.

“A lot of people leave overdose scenes because they don’t want to interact with police,” said Erin Russell, a principal with Health Management Associates, a health care industry research and consulting firm. Florida does include a caveat in its statute that any person “acting in good faith” to seek medical assistance for someone they believe to be overdosing “may not” be arrested, charged, or prosecuted.

And even when public policy is crafted to protect first responders as well as regular people, misinformation can undermine a program’s messaging.

Take Mississippi’s One Pill Can Kill initiative. Led by the state attorney general, Lynn Fitch, the initiative aims to provide resources and education to Mississippi residents about fentanyl and its risks. While it promotes the availability and use of harm reduction tools, such as naloxone and fentanyl test strips, Fitch has also propped up misinformation.

At the 2024 Mississippi Coalition of Bail Sureties conference, Fitch said, “If you figure out that pill’s got fentanyl, you better be ready to dispose of it, because you can get it through your fingers,” based on the repeatedly debunked belief that a person can overdose by simply touching fentanyl.

Officers on the ground, meanwhile, sometimes are warned to proceed with caution in providing lifesaving interventions at overdose scenes because of these alleged accidental exposure risks. This caution is often evidenced in a push to provide first responders with masks and other personal protective equipment. Fitch told the crowd at the conference: “You can’t just go out and give CPR like you did before.” However, as with other secondhand exposures, the risk for a fentanyl overdose from applying mouth-to-mouth is negligible, with no clinical evidence to suggest it has occurred.

Her comments underscore growing concerns, often not supported by science, that officers and first responders increasingly face exposure risks during overdose responses. Her office did not respond to questions about these comments.

Health care experts say they are not against providing first responders with protective equipment, but that fentanyl misinformation is clouding policy and risks delaying critical interventions such as CPR and rescue breathing.

“People are afraid to do rescue breathing because they’re like, ‘Well, what if there’s fentanyl in the person’s mouth,’” Russell said. Hesitating for even a moment because of fentanyl misinformation could delay a technique that “is incredibly important in an overdose response.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

He was prescribed painkillers as a teenager for a series of sports injuries. He said the doctor never warned him they could be addictive. Julian didn’t learn that fact until years later, when he was cut off and began suffering withdrawal symptoms. At that point, he started siphoning pills from family members and buying them from others in his southern Maine community.

After his brother died of brain cancer in 2011, Julian used opioids to cope with more than physical pain.

He stole to support his addiction, cycled in and out of jail and treatment, and overdosed 10 times, he said. His mother once gave him CPR on their bathroom floor.

Life was “hell on Earth,” said Julian, now 43 and in long-term recovery.

Like tens of thousands of others who have suffered similarly, Julian filed claims for compensation from pharmaceutical companies accused of fueling the opioid crisis.

Earlier this year, he received his first payout: $324.58.

That’s enough to fill his car with gas about eight times or pay about a tenth of the rent for an apartment he shares with his fiancee and two children.

Meanwhile, Maine’s Cumberland County, where Julian lives, has received more than $700,000 in opioid settlement money and expects nearly $1.6 million more in the coming years, according to a newly updated database from KFF Health News. Jurisdictions throughout his state have received more than $68 million to date, and governments nationwide have raked in upward of $10 billion, the database shows.

That discrepancy between individuals’ and governments’ compensations highlights a sense of injustice felt by people directly affected by the crisis who say their suffering is the reason that governments secured these settlements.

Opioid settlements with companies like Purdue Pharma, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson have led to headline-grabbing multibillion-dollar payouts, but most of the windfall is flowing to state and local governments, not directly to victims of the crisis.

Only a handful of companies — those that filed for bankruptcy, including Purdue Pharma, Mallinckrodt, Endo, and Rite Aid — have set aside payouts for individuals. To qualify, people must have filed claims within a certain window and provided documents proving they were prescribed painkillers from that company. Even then, many victims will receive just a few thousand dollars, lawyers and advocates estimate. Most of these companies have not started paying yet, so victims might have to wait months or years more before seeing the cash.

In contrast, state and local governments have already received settlement money. To understand the size of those payouts, KFF Health News in January downloaded data from BrownGreer, the court-appointed firm administering many national opioid settlements, and used it to update a searchable database that allows users to determine how much their city, county, or state has received or expects to receive each year.

Governments are receiving that money because attorneys general argued that their states’ public safety, health, and social service systems were harmed by the opioid crisis. Jurisdictions are supposed to spend settlement money on addiction treatment, recovery, and prevention programs. But many affected individuals and families say governments have failed to adhere to that mission.

“At the very minimum, they could spend these dollars right to prevent the future loss of life,” said Ryan Hampton, a national recovery advocate and previous co-chair of a committee in the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy case, where he represented victims. “That is the opposite of what we’ve seen to date.”

In Pennsylvania, a group of bereaved family members raised similar concerns to Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, who finalized opioid settlements when he was attorney general.

“Instead of directing funds toward evidence-based solutions, you and your administration have allowed counties to divert these resources into law enforcement, ineffective programs, and initiatives that already have other funding streams available — disrespecting both our families and the lives lost,” they wrote in a letter dated Feb. 14. “Meanwhile, bereaved families — many of whom have lost everything — have no financial relief.”

‘Governments Were Way More Powerful’

To be sure, many governments have spent millions of settlement dollars on treatment programs, recovery supports, distribution of overdose reversal medications, and other efforts. Some officials in charge of the money say those services, which reach many residents, can have a greater impact than individual payouts.

Will Simons, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania governor, said in a statement that the Shapiro administration has invested nearly $90 million of settlement funds into treatment, recovery, harm reduction, and prevention initiatives, including prevention programs for youths, a drug and alcohol call center, and loan repayment programs aimed at retaining workers in the addiction treatment and recovery field.

Many of the awarded organizations “support families who have lost loved ones to this crisis, providing counseling and other family supports,” Simons said.

A few jurisdictions have created fairly modest funds directed at individuals, such as one in Boston to aid families who have lost loved ones to addiction, and a fund in Alabama for grandparents having to raise children because of parental substance use.

But nationwide, there’s little that resembles the widespread cash payments that many advocates, like Hampton, originally envisioned.

In the mid-2010s, Hampton said, he and other advocates considered filing class action lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies but realized they didn’t have the resources.

A few years later, when state attorneys general began pursuing cases against those companies, victims were thrilled, thinking they would finally get compensation alongside their governments. Hampton and other advocates held rallies, shared their stories publicly, and galvanized support for the states’ lawsuits.

In 2019, when Hampton became co-chair of the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors in Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy and arrived at the negotiating table with state attorneys general and other entities, he thought “everybody was there to take on the big bad pharmaceutical company and to put victims’ interests first,” he said. But as the negotiation proceeded among various creditors vying for the company’s assets, he said, “governments were way more powerful than victims and believed that they were more harmed than victims in terms of cost.”

Details of the Purdue settlement are still being finalized, and payments are unlikely to start until next year, but estimates suggest state and local governments will receive the lion’s share, while more than 100,000 victims will split a fraction of the bankruptcy payout.

Mallinckrodt, a manufacturer of generic opioids, is the only company that had begun paying victims as of early 2025, said Frank Younes, a partner at the Nebraska-based law firm High & Younes, which is representing personal injury claimants in several opioid bankruptcies.

After paying roughly 25% in administrative fees to the national trust overseeing the bankruptcy and an additional 40% in attorney fees, some of his clients have received between $400 and $700, Younes said.

He expects payouts from two other companies — Endo and Rite Aid — “will be even lower.”

But many victims won’t receive anything. Some didn’t know they could file claims until it was too late. Others struggled to obtain medical records from shuttered doctors’ offices or pharmacies that didn’t retain older documents.

Out of nearly 20,000 people who contacted Younes’ firm to participate in the various opioid bankruptcies, he said, only about 3,500 were able to file.

‘Do Something for These Families’

John McNerney was told his Purdue Pharma claim didn’t qualify, because he hadn’t been prescribed enough OxyContin to meet the threshold. He submitted claims for Mallinckrodt and Endo instead.

McNerney, 60, who lives in Boca Raton, Florida, said he suffered a spinal injury decades ago from a fall during a plumbing repair. For years afterward, he was prescribed various painkillers. Once his doctors cut him off, he began using pills a friend bought off the street. McNerney spent about $30,000 on rehabs before he entered long-term recovery.

Now when he sees governments spending settlement money on police cars or library books about addiction “instead of putting 100% of it into rehab,” he said, “it really bothers the heck out of me.”

“I haven’t received a nickel,” he said.

In Ohio, a group of affected families were similarly frustrated that money wasn’t reaching them or the places where they thought it was needed most.

The families teamed up with local nonprofits to submit grant applications to the OneOhio Recovery Foundation, which controls most of the state’s opioid settlement funds. They asked for several million dollars to put toward family support groups, training for family members who take in children whose parents have substance use disorders, and emergency cash aid for families to buy cribs or school supplies and cover funeral costs.

Jackie Lewis, a member of the group, said that when her 34-year-old son, Shaun, died of an overdose, she had to pay his funeral costs by credit card. She has filed a claim in the opioid bankruptcies but hasn’t received any money yet.

“Too many families didn’t have a credit card to do that with,” Lewis said. “There are families I’ve talked to that couldn’t do flowers. Some had to do a cremation instead of a traditional funeral.”

Her group did not receive funding in the first round of grants from the OneOhio Recovery Foundation.

Connie Luck, a spokesperson for the foundation, said the legal documents that established the foundation do not allow direct payments to individuals affected by the crisis. The foundation has awarded over $45 million to 245 projects throughout the state, including dozens that provide family support services like child care and rental assistance.

“We deeply empathize with those who have lost loved ones to the opioid epidemic — their pain is real, and it fuels the Foundation’s mission to end this crisis and prevent it from happening again,” Luck said in a statement.

In Maine, Julian has made peace with his $325 payout, deciding to consider it a surprise bonus rather than compensation for his years of suffering.

But he hopes governments will use their more substantial sums to provide real help — food and rental assistance for people in recovery and more treatment beds so no one has to wait six months to enter rehab as he once did.

“They’re getting millions of dollars,” said Julian, who has lost numerous close friends to overdose. “They could do something for these families that have suffered great losses.”

KFF Health News data editor Holly K. Hacker contributed to this article.

Methodology

For more than two years, KFF Health News has been tracking how state and local governments use — and misuse — billions of dollars in opioid settlement funds. This database marks our third update of data showing how much money state and local governments have received through national settlements with companies that made or distributed prescription painkillers.

BrownGreer, the court-appointed firm administering many national opioid settlements, tracks how much money it has delivered to various state and local governments, as well as how much is allocated to those jurisdictions for future years. It initially kept this information private.

In 2023, KFF Health News negotiated to obtain that information and made it public for the first time. Five months later, BrownGreer began posting updated versions of the information on a public website.

Last year, KFF Health News downloaded BrownGreer’s data on payouts from pharmaceutical distributors AmerisourceBergen (now called Cencora), Cardinal Health, and McKesson, as well as opioid manufacturer Janssen (now known as Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine), and used the state-by-state spreadsheets with separate entries for each settling company to create a searchable database.

This year, KFF Health News has updated that database with new data from BrownGreer, including payouts from opioid manufacturers Allergan and Teva, as well as CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart pharmacies.

KFF Health News downloaded data from BrownGreer’s website between Jan. 20 and 24, 2025, concerning payouts from all companies. Users can use the database to determine the total dollar amount their city, county, or state has received or expects to receive each year.

Although this is the most comprehensive data available at a national scale, it provides just a snapshot of all opioid settlement payouts. Other settlements, including with OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma, are still pending. This data does not reflect additional settlements that some state and local governments have entered into beyond the national deals, such as the agreement between Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, and Ohio and regional supermarket chain Meijer. As such, this database undercounts the amount of opioid settlement money most places have received and will receive.

Payment details for some states are not available, because those states were not part of national settlement agreements, had unique settlement terms, or opted not to have their payments distributed via BrownGreer. A few examples:

• West Virginia declined to join several national settlements and instead reached individual settlements with many of these companies.• Texas and Nevada were paid in full by Janssen outside the national settlement, so their payout data reflects payments only from other companies with which they entered national settlements.• Florida, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania, among others, opted to receive a lump-sum payment via BrownGreer then distribute the money to localities themselves.

BrownGreer shows that several states received some of their anticipated 2027 payment from the distributors (AmerisourceBergen — now called Cencora — Cardinal Health, and McKesson) early in 2024. However, for three states — Colorado, Michigan, and Washington — BrownGreer does not provide data on how much of this prepayment went to each locality. As such, locality payments in these states may be undercounted for 2024 and overcounted for 2027.

For Oregon, BrownGreer shows 2024 payments from Walmart as fully paid in its statewide data but lists some August 2024 payments for localities as “projected.” Since the data was downloaded well past that August 2024 date, we have included those “projected” amounts in the 2024 paid total for Oregon localities. No other states had this discrepancy.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

But did you know older adults are increasingly at risk of overdosing from opioids, too?

In fact, from 2021 to 2022, adults over 65 saw the largest increase — 10 percent — in overdose death rates across all age groups.

Yet their addiction care needs are often overlooked, even in places teeming with medical staff, such as long-term care facilities that primarily serve older patients. My colleague Aneri Pattani and I dug into the issue.

One study estimated that older adults were the least likely in 2022 to receive any type of care for opioid use disorder. They were also unlikely to receive medications such as buprenorphine and methadone — considered the treatment gold standard.

When people think of who actively uses drugs, “they don’t want to think about grandma, they don’t think about grandpa, and they certainly don’t want to think about what could be happening at a nursing home,” said A. Toni Young, executive director of Community Education Group, a nonprofit that advocates on substance use policy.

But Young’s organization, along with more than 50 other advocacy groups, is working to bring the issue front and center. In a letter shared exclusively with KFF Health News and the Health Brief, the coalition is urging the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to ensure older patients get the help they need.

“Many Americans living in residential care facilities may not be in a position to effectively advocate for their own medical interests,” the letter says. “They must be able to trust you to hold their facility operators accountable to uphold the law.”

Facilities that receive Medicaid and Medicare payments are required to abide by federal laws, including the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Fair Housing Act. The laws bar discrimination due to current or past addiction and mandate appropriate medical care, including medications for opioid use disorder.

“However, without enforcement, the law is just words,” the letter notes.

To change that, the letter writers urge CMS to “undertake a systematic education, investigation, and enforcement effort, covering all categories of residential care facilities that you oversee.”

In a statement to KFF Health News, CMS said its updated staffing guidelines, released this year, require nursing facilities to ensure they have the staffing and resources to care for patients with serious mental illness or substance use disorder. The agency directs facilities to have care plans in place to “prevent adverse events, such as an overdose.” It has also partnered with other federal agencies to create free programs to boost nursing home care for patients with addiction and mental health concerns.

The agency did not directly address how such guidelines would be enforced.

This article is not available for syndication due to republishing restrictions. If you have questions about the availability of this or other content for republication, please contact NewsWeb@kff.org.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

The Philadelphia neighborhood is a critical center of the nation’s opioid crisis, and the city had decided to spend $7.5 million in opioid settlement money to improve the quality of life there. But on that day, a Pennsylvania oversight board was about to vote on whether to reject the city’s decision.

It was a thorny issue with major implications — both for Kensington residents and people across the state, as the decision could set a precedent for what kind of spending the board would allow for years to come.

But a lot of people were shut out of the discussion.

Pennsylvania’s board doesn’t allow members of the public to speak at its meetings, a rule that sets it apart from about two dozen similar opioid councils nationwide.

“It’s another moment where folks not connected to this community are making decisions for this community, and I think that’s inappropriate,” said Bill McKinney, a Kensington resident whose nonprofit is involved in some of the city’s settlement-funded initiatives. “Those that are sort of most affected are not at the table.”

It’s one example of how the public, including people who have lost loved ones to the opioid crisis or are dealing with it daily, are routinely shut out of having a meaningful say in how this windfall can be best used to address the damage. They are eager to suggest solutions for dollars that many of them consider blood money. But a first-of-its-kind survey conducted by KFF Health News and Spotlight PA found that, in many places, their voices are systematically dismissed.

In at least 39 states and Washington, D.C., councils consisting of government officials, clinicians, law enforcement officers, and others guide decisions about how to spend settlement dollars. These powerful groups are influencing addiction policy and funding at a time when more than 100,000 Americans are dying of overdoses annually.

At least 14 of these councils — including Pennsylvania’s — routinely block members of the public from speaking at their meetings. Four of those typically conduct their meetings in secret, barring the public from even attending or observing.

The survey also found:

• The majority of councils do not make video recordings of their meetings readily available online for those who cannot attend live. Although some councils said recordings can be accessed through public records requests, at least one — Minnesota’s Opioid Epidemic Response Advisory Council — deletes its recordings after using them to create meeting minutes. (Minnesota law does not require the council to record its open meetings or post recordings online.)
• At least five states have used committees or work groups that meet in private, or have a policy for allowing such private meetings. In Pennsylvania, such work groups have become a point of contention, with victims, advocates, and even one member of the council questioning their legality. (The Pennsylvania Opioid Misuse and Addiction Abatement Trust’s administrative director said the work groups’ meetings are not required to be public. They make recommendations that the full council decides on.)

Practices that close the public out of settlement spending discussions are “unconscionable,” said Stephen Loyd, chair of Tennessee’s Opioid Abatement Council, which regularly allows public attendance and comment at its meetings. “This is the population we’re there to serve. They have to have a voice in this process.”

Different Stances on Public Comment

People directly affected by the issue are a staple of the Tennessee council’s meetings. This year, commenters have included several parents holding photos of their deceased children and choking back tears, and at least one frustrated community member.

At the June meeting in Memphis, Peter Hossler, an associate professor at Rhodes College, said he was “very angry” about how the council’s recent grant awards of $81 million seemed to shortchange the western part of the state.

Loyd called such critique “invaluable,” comparing it to the feedback he received from loved ones during his recovery journey.

“We have to be held accountable,” he told KFF Health News and Spotlight PA. “And then we have to fix it.” Hossler’s comments are changing the council’s conversation about its next round of grants, Loyd added.

Loyd believes people who have been failed by the current system know what needs to be improved “better than anybody.”

“I want to talk to the people who had medication stopped in jail and laid there and withdrew,” he said. “I want to talk to the people who got out of jail with no money, a couple of felonies hanging over their heads, three meetings they had to make that week or they're going to be in violation of their probation, and they ain't got a car or driver's license.”

States cited a variety of reasons for limiting public involvement. In some, state law does not require councils to take public comment at meetings. Several officials said they’ve sought feedback in other ways. An official in New Jersey said its council held public listening sessions, but that its monthly meetings are not public.

Some officials may worry that public comment would add to meetings that already run multiple hours, but several states manage that by limiting each person’s comment to a few minutes.

For communities of color, being shut out of opioid settlement discussions can compound the negative effects not just from today’s overdose crisis but from the earlier crack cocaine epidemic. Many people considered the government’s response at that time to be ineffective and harmful.

If settlement money is used only to “build on what's already in place, you've already failed,” said Philip Rutherford, an expert on substance use disorder at the National Council for Mental Wellbeing.

At a July 2023 meeting of Illinois’ settlement council, Fanya Burford-Berry said the current system doesn’t work for women of color with substance use disorder — they can risk losing custody of their children. Burford-Berry, director of the West Side Heroin/Opioid Task Force in Chicago, hopes comments like hers will prompt the council to support solutions tailored to women of color, including bringing together more organizations that already work in those communities.

“When you allow more people to be involved, and then they have an idea, and they get excited about it, then they get more people involved and the circle of healing can become larger,” she said.

‘A Retraumatizing Moment’

In Pennsylvania, the state’s 13-member opioid settlement board has the power to withhold future funding if it decides local governments spent their money inappropriately. At its June meeting, the board — which includes a state senator representing part of Kensington — voted to disapprove of Philadelphia’s use of $7.5 million for park improvements, home repairs, rent relief, and other initiatives in Kensington. (Philadelphia later appealed the rejection; the issue is pending.)

McKinney, the Kensington resident and executive director of the New Kensington Community Development Corporation, called the board’s decision “a retraumatizing moment” for residents and criticized the way they were silenced.

“I think it’s unfortunate that things were chosen to be done that way,” McKinney said.

Others have also been frustrated by Pennsylvania’s settlement council.

Gail Groves Scott, a public health policy advocate who has a child in sustained recovery from an opioid use disorder, attended a board meeting in person last year. Not allowing the public to comment at meetings, she said, prevents them from offering feedback at critical times, such as when the board is considering county spending plans or contracts for its operations.

“We could be questioning those decisions or adding information they may not be aware of,” Groves Scott said. “It’s disappointing that, despite pushback from multiple people, they have not changed.”

Some advocates say the closed sessions of work groups, which make recommendations about which programs to approve, obscure why the full board takes certain action.

Pennsylvania trust officials have defended their practices.

Briana Anderson, the trust’s administrative director, downplayed the group’s role, saying it does not make specific spending decisions on settlement money but reviews choices made by local governments. State law doesn’t require the trust to offer public comment at its meetings but the public is encouraged to participate at the local level, Anderson added.

Pennsylvania’s practices contrast sharply with the way councils operate in places like Illinois, Kentucky, and Oregon, which routinely allow public comment at both full council and smaller committee meetings. In Kentucky, the open process has allowed members of the public to weigh in on a fierce debate over funding research into ibogaine, a psychedelic drug that has shown potential to treat addiction. At least eight people spoke in favor of the drug at the council’s January meeting.

Back in Tennessee, council chair Loyd said he hopes to increase public participation by creating an advisory panel that consists primarily of people who have personally experienced addiction or their loved ones.

He also encouraged other settlement councils to embrace opportunities to hear from people in their states.

“You’ll make better decisions as a result. I can’t be convinced otherwise,” he said.

Methodology

In June and July, reporters from KFF Health News and Spotlight PA surveyed opioid settlement councils in 39 states and Washington, D.C., to assess their general and standard practices for engaging with the public. The team also reviewed council websites, meeting minutes, agendas, and, in some cases, hours of meeting recordings. These councils have various roles, including directly deciding how to spend the money, making recommendations, or providing oversight. Although they go by different names, including advisory councils, boards, committees, and commissions, we refer to them as councils as a broad, encompassing term.

Spotlight PA is an independent, nonpartisan, and nonprofit newsroom producing investigative and public-service journalism that holds power to account and drives positive change in Pennsylvania. Sign up for its free newsletters.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

How the state and local governments choose to use this cash windfall in the years ahead will significantly shape Mississippi’s policies toward addiction treatment and prevention — as well as health care in general.

We’ve broken down the key things you need to know about the settlements.

Where Is the Money Going?

Mississippi has begun to receive portions of the approximately $203 million it expects from national settlements with three pharmaceutical distributors and one opioid manufacturer. The state also expects an estimated additional $167 million from national opioid settlements with other companies.

The money is split into three buckets: 15% goes to the state government; another 15% to counties and cities, which will be distributed based on population and how heavily the crisis has affected those communities; and the remaining 70% to an opioid abatement fund that will be controlled by the state legislature.

Policymakers and local officials are starting to develop plans for how to use these dollars. The opioid agreements set out guidelines for spending, including nine core opioid abatement strategies — which consist of activities like broadening access to naloxone and medications for opioid use disorder, as well as investing in prevention efforts.

Who Is Controlling the Money in Mississippi?

Both the state government’s share and the abatement fund will be under the direct control of the state legislature, which will ultimately decide how that money gets spent. The legislature, through an appropriations act, has set up a special account for all of the funds it controls.

“We were encouraged by the fact that they set [a fund] up, because that’s the first necessary step,” said Michelle Williams, chief of staff for state Attorney General Lynn Fitch. Advocates across the nation have recommended that states create special funds for the dollars they receive before making any decisions about how to use them.

To date, though, Mississippi’s state and abatement shares have been tapped only to cover attorneys fees from the opioid litigations, according to Williams. Across the country, many jurisdictions have been slow to spend their funds.

The attorney general’s office, which helped negotiate the settlements on behalf of Mississippi, has already signaled some priorities for the money. One is to establish a Center for Addiction Medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center — an idea mentioned in an agreement the office reached with cities and counties. The creation and operation of this center would be supported by the abatement fund — the largest pot of settlement dollars. Lawmakers have not widely discussed the proposal, however, and confusion surrounds plan specifics.

According to Williams, the concept arose from conversations with UMMC and members of the legislature. The attorney general’s office provided a document that explains why this new center should receive millions in settlement funds.

That’s where any cohesion in Mississippi’s planning seems to begin and end. UMMC, for instance, declined to confirm any communication with the attorney general’s office about the idea of a new center or answer any questions about the proposal. The system already operates a center that focuses on addiction research and treatment.

According to Leah Smith, deputy chief of staff for Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, his office intends to meet with Mississippi state leaders and advocates “to establish a plan to be adopted by the Legislature when it next meets in January,” although the timeline is uncertain.

The Mississippi Association of Supervisors, whose purpose is to “support and educate county officials and others on topics and issues important to county governments,” reported not having developed a plan to support their members as they prepare to spend the money. By contrast, the Arkansas Municipal League and the Association of Arkansas Counties has created a joint fund that helps local governments there coordinate opioid abatement activities.

Mike Moore — the former Mississippi attorney general who spearheaded the landmark national tobacco master settlement agreement and has been involved in opioid litigation across several states — has concerns about the disjointed approach in Mississippi.

“If you're just going to send checks out to every little city and county, I don't know what encourages collaboration there,” he said.

How Has the Money Been Spent So Far?

Every eligible Mississippi county will receive a portion of the approximately $54 million set aside for localities. Choctaw, Montgomery, Sharkey, Webster, and Wilkinson counties were ineligible.

Dozens of cities and towns throughout the state will also be receiving funds, though the amount varies drastically. Gulfport is expected to receive nearly $4.5 million through 2038, the most of any locality in the state. During that same time, Diamondhead will receive about $92.

These payments may increase as the state finalizes settlements with additional companies.

Gulfport is the state’s second-largest city, with a population of roughly 73,000. The coastal city has received at least $430,000 so far. Decisions about how the money is spent will be made by the City Council.

Gulfport councilmember Ella Holmes-Hines would like to see the money go to community organizations that serve people struggling with addiction and law enforcement officer training.

“The problem is how and why you got the money, so therefore you have to address the problem,” she said.

So far the city has used only $4,000, to fund a local Thanksgiving and Christmas meal-delivery program last year.

Few counties reported having concrete plans.

Harrison County Board of Supervisors President Marlin Ladner, for instance, said spending decisions may be made this budget season. Harrison County, where Gulfport is located, led the state in suspected overdose deaths and naloxone administrations in 2022. Similarly, Jackson County — which had the state’s highest number of suspected overdose deaths per 100,000 residents in 2023 — has yet to budget the funds, according to the County Administrator’s office.

At the other end of the state, the DeSoto County Board of Supervisors has committed the $116,000 it has received so far to fund a crisis center.

“It’s for immediate crisis — for if someone has an addiction problem or mental illness, or needs to come for counseling,” said Lee Caldwell, Board of Supervisors president. “DeSoto County likes to be first, but we don’t want to be first in opioid deaths. We don’t want to be first in the challenges that it brings to families because of addiction.”

What Are the Advocates Saying?

As the decision-makers wrestle with their next steps, people who see Mississippi’s opioid crisis firsthand say the need continues to be very real.

“My friends are dying in the streets. We have overdoses every day,” said Jason McCarty, executive director of the Mississippi Harm Reduction Initiative, a community organization that supports people struggling with and recovering from opioid addictions.

Part of the challenge he and other advocates face is keeping the state’s problem in focus.

Provisional data from The Mississippi Opioid and Heroin Data Collaborative indicates that at least 1,257 people died of suspected opioid-related causes from 2020 to 2023 — an average of 314 people a year. That’s lower than the death toll in many other places, he said, but not reflective of what’s happening.

“Mississippi doesn’t look like it actually has a problem compared to other states. But I know that we do,” McCarty said.

Some parts of the state have been hit harder than others. The coastal region stands out, in recent years representing an outsize portion of Mississippi’s suspected overdose deaths, emergency medical services naloxone administrations, and drug-related arrests.

Grassroots organizations, McCarty said, should be first in line to receive settlement resources. The harm reduction initiative distributes naloxone, operates a recovery community center in Jackson, and does educational programming with Mississippi youth.

But in his experience, that’s not how the distribution of resources works.

“I feel like money keeps going to these big organizations who are really not doing grassroots work,” McCarty said.

McCarty and other advocates said it’s difficult to find out what’s going on with settlement funds. He said no one has contacted his organization for input on how the state should spend the money.

Jody Couch founded Inside Out Outreach, which works to provide faith-based support for the homeless population in Gulfport, many of whom have addictions. She believes the money could be best spent addressing the lack of housing and other resources in her area.

“That funding could help with the cost of getting treatment and for it to be local,” she said.

Couch has been contacted for input by at least one local official in Gulfport as the city prepares to decide how to spend its share of the opioid settlement funds.

She believes what the opioid settlement funds need most is oversight to ensure accountability about how the money is spent in her community.

But the state has not implemented public reporting requirements. Localities do not have to say how much money they have received or how it has been spent. There are also no requirements dictating how localities must use the money — they could use it to fill potholes.

Similar concerns about misuse are playing out nationally, but at the same time, there’s hope that the money can do good.

“History will be written. We'll find out how well they do,” said Moore, the former Mississippi attorney general. “But my gut tells me that they're going to be pretty serious about the money being spent in the right way.”

KFF Health News senior correspondent Aneri Pattani contributed to this report.

This report was produced through a collaboration between KFF Health News and Mississippi Today.

Mississippi Today, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, has exposed corruption, provided critical information in times of crisis, and broken down complicated issues like health care and criminal justice so that everyday people can understand how policy impacts their lives. Founded in 2016 as the state’s flagship nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom, Mississippi Today’s roots in Capitol coverage have grown to encompass a myriad of beats beyond politics and policy, including education, health, justice, environment, and equity.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).