Quote:Perhaps no one stands to lose out more under the AHCA than the people who live in southeastern Kentucky. In 2013, 20.4 percent of Kentuckians lacked health insurance. Now just 7.8 percent do. More Kentucky residents report having a regular source of health care, and fewer say they have skipped needed medical attention because of the cost. The AHCA would reverse many of those gains. The bill the House passed would end the Medicaid expansion, a program responsible for three-quarters of Kentucky’s coverage gains...

But Oller doesn’t regret her vote for Trump — “I don’t have regrets,” she says plainly — and she trusts that Rogers, whom she has also voted for, knows what he’s doing. She gets most her news from his weekly emails to constituents; she cites his arguments for why the law needs to be repealed. This sentiment felt ubiquitous in Corbin. Obamacare enrollees I interviewed didn’t like the Republican plan, but they still trusted the Republican Party to do the right thing on health care. They felt like they had picked a side, and now they were going to stick with it.

Quote:As Robert Lewis Jr. predicted, America is becoming a more hostile and racist place under President Donald Trump.
The week after the election, I met Lewis, an African-American retiree and a longtime civil rights activist, on a reporting trip to Concordia, Louisiana. Lewis told me he was afraid that prejudice — and any fragile gains in basic civil rights for black people — was about to grow worse under the new administration.

Trump, Lewis said, with visible distress on his face and in his voice, “[is] only going to make those racist skinheads, the KKK come out. The racists feel like they have a man in office who is supporting 'em, backing 'em up."

Health researchers are now confirming Lewis’s fears. In a new literature review published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the authors looked at the growing body of research on big political events, like elections and 9/11. They found people with racist sentiments have been emboldened since the 2016 election, and that anxiety and stress are on the rise. They also found that premature births and deaths, and an increased risk for disease, were part of a package of worrisome health consequences that might arise after the 2016 election.

“There is a steady drumbeat of incidents of hostility in the news,” said lead author David Williams, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, “So there is a pressing need to make health care providers aware of the health consequences.””