​LOS ANGELES — At Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital, patients on gurneys line the hallways of the emergency department waiting for care, and overflow mental health patients are consigned to outdoor tents.

The 152-bed hospital, which sits on a sprawling medical campus close to the predominantly Latino and Black neighborhood of Watts, is struggling for financial stability. Its patients are poorer and sicker than average, many of them are uninsured, and three-quarters of MLK’s patient care revenue comes from Medi-Cal, the state’s version of the Medicaid program, which pays low rates. For hospitals statewide, by comparison, less than one-third of patient revenue comes from Medi-Cal.

And MLK Community Healthcare, which comprises the hospital and two nearby clinics, is independent, so it cannot fall back on a larger chain to absorb some of the financial pressure.  

Similar problems plague hundreds of financially vulnerable hospitals around the country, in rural and urban areas. And their financial woes are about to get worse.

The Republican budget measure known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump last July, is expected to cut federal Medicaid spending by $911 billion over 10 years. And it could contribute to an increase of more than 14 million in the number of uninsured people, many of whom will go to already crowded emergency rooms to get care they can’t pay for.

The law does include a special fund to boost rural healthcare, totaling $50 billion over five years. But that’s far less than the $137 billion it is expected to cut from rural health spending over the next decade. And the rural health fund does little or nothing to help the numerous urban hospitals, such as MLK, that also face serious financial troubles.

MLK, like many other hospitals, is scrambling to secure outside financing to avert serious disruptions of medical services when the brunt of the policies contained in the federal law begins to hit early next year. The hospital’s leadership team projects a revenue hole of $80 million to $100 million annually for the foreseeable future. It would be MLK’s largest budget gap since it opened in 2015.

“Even if we cut services that our community needs — maternity care, behavioral healthcare, diabetes management — it wouldn’t make a significant dent in the gap we’re facing,” said Elaine Batchlor, the CEO of MLK Community Healthcare. ”Many of those same people would still come to us through our emergency department, only they’d be in worse shape and might need more expensive care.”

MLK Community Healthcare CEO Elaine Batchlor stands outside the check-in area for Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital’s emergency department, a long tent outside the main building in Los Angeles. (Bernard J. Wolfson/KFF Health News)

Across the U.S., hospitals and patient advocates are looking to state lawmakers and local officials to help shore up shaky fina  

​Céline Gounder, KFF Health News’ editor-at-large for public health, discussed the results of the FDA’s largest baby formula safety test on CBS News 24/7’s The Daily Report on April 29. She also discussed how women seeking treatment for menopause symptoms are facing a shortage of estrogen patches on CBS News’ CBS Mornings on April 27.

Click here to watch Gounder on The Daily Report.

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KFF Health News senior correspondent Renuka Rayasam discussed the rising cost of postcancer care on WUGA’s The Georgia Health Report on April 24.

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Read Rayasam’s “They’re in Remission, but Their Medical Bills Aren’t: Cancer Survivors Navigate Soaring Costs.”

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.This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://kffhealthnews.org/on-air/on-air-may-2-2026-baby-formula-safety-test-menopause-postcancer-care-costs/”>article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://kffhealthnews.org”>KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://kffhealthnews.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
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​If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.”

Someone in America dies by suicide every 11 minutes. It’s that common. But that doesn’t make it normal.

Humans have evolved over centuries to survive. So when people try to kill themselves, something has gone wrong. Typically, the assumption is that something happened in the person’s mind — a mental illness.

That’s led prevention efforts to typically focus on connecting people with treatment in moments of crisis.

But that’s changing. There’s a growing movement asking a different question: What went wrong in the world around that person?

During the covid pandemic, rates of anxiety and depression spiked — not because everyone’s brain chemistry suddenly changed but because the world changed. People were out of work, isolated, struggling to make ends meet.

That led many people in the mental health advocacy world to call for a broader approach. Treatments and crisis care are vital, they say, but the goal of suicide prevention needs to expand beyond stopping people from dying to also giving them reasons to live.

Decades of research supports this idea. Interventions that improve people’s lives and prospects, such as running food banks to ensure families don’t go hungry or hosting weekly book clubs for homebound seniors to make friends, can reduce suicide.

I spoke with Chris Pawelski, a fourth-generation farmer in Orange County, New York, for this story. He told me how his dad’s passing, caring for his mom with dementia, and the struggling finances of his family’s onion farm brought him to consider suicide.

“It’s all stuff collapsing down upon you,” he said. “It’s weeks, months, years of dealing with all sorts of pressures that you can’t alleviate.”

What helped him through that time was not just family support and therapy. It was also an economic plan. He worked with an organization called NY FarmNet, which provided a free financial consultant who helped Pawelski transition from farming onions for wholesale to a new model, growing varied produce to sell directly to consumers.

Today, Pawelski’s business has stabilized, and he and his wife are paying down debt. He advocates for programs to help others in similar situations.

That can mean crisis hotlines and access to affordable therapy, Pawelski said. But what he really wants are policy changes that help people address underlying hardships before a crisis strikes.

“We need to think broader and longer-term than a helpline,” he said. That’s “a band-aid on a gunshot wound.”

ELEVEN MINUTES

Saving Lives by Changing Lives: The Next Frontier in Suicide Prevention

Someone in America dies by suicide every 11 minutes. It’s a tragic  

​If you or someone you know is seeking help for addiction recovery, contact the free and confidential treatment referral hotline, 1-800-662-HELP, or visit findtreatment.gov.

A day after Hurricane Helene ripped through western North Carolina in late September 2024, Toni Brewer had no power or water. The storm had strewn fallen trees across most roads, wiped out phone and internet communications, and put some neighborhoods near her Asheville home underwater.

Brewer cleared out the food in her refrigerator, grabbed some clothes, and drove more than an hour southwest with her partner to Franklin, to stay with relatives.

When she arrived, she opened the center console of her car, where she kept medication, and discovered another crisis. She had only three days’ worth of Suboxone, a brand of buprenorphine, a prescription drug that eases opioid cravings. Without it, she risked relapsing into a life she described as miserable.

She recalled what it felt like to have those cravings and panicked.

“It’s terrifying just to have that feeling again of, ‘I need this, and I’ll do whatever it takes to get this,’” said Brewer, who had been in recovery from opioid addiction for 18 months at the time. She needed a new prescription but knew communication lines at her doctor’s office were down.

Now, a group of doctors is using the example of Hurricane Helene to urge federal lawmakers to help improve access to substance use medications in severe weather emergencies. Four physicians working in addiction medicine published an American Journal of Public Health editorial that outlines strategies for getting medication to people in recovery during natural disasters.

As climate change threatens to cause an increased number of disasters in the U.S., the group of doctors urged state and federal governments to act soon or risk allowing more disasters to aggravate overdoses, relapses, and deaths caused by opioid use disorder, an ongoing epidemic that has killed more than 800,000 people in the U.S. since 1999.

One study estimated that after Superstorm Sandy in 2012, 70% of New Yorkers who relied on recovery medications couldn’t get enough of them. In the two years following Hurricane Maria’s devastation in Puerto Rico in 2017, overdose reports increased, another study found. The Tubbs and Camp fires in Northern California caused substantial disruptions in patients’ access to opioid addiction medications, found a study published in 2022.

A combination of factors aggravates the opioid crisis in the U.S., the AJPH editorial authors noted. Mental health stressors, treatment disruptions, drug market volatility, and economic decline all create conditions in which climate-related disasters heighten the risk of overdose deaths.

“We make it so challenging for them to access treatment medications in the first place,” said Elizabeth Cerceo, the climate health director at Rowan University’s Cooper Medical School and a co-autho  

​If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.”

Someone in America dies by suicide every 11 minutes. It’s that common. But not normal.

Humans have evolved over centuries to survive. So when people try to kill themselves, something has gone wrong. Typically, the assumption is that something happened in the person’s mind — a mental illness.

But in recent decades, there’s been a growing movement to ask a different question: What went wrong in the world around that person?

For Chris Pawelski, it was a torrent of factors. His dad — one of his best friends, whom he worked with daily for decades — was diagnosed with renal cancer and died six months later. Pawelski was left as the primary caregiver for his mom, who had dementia.

His family’s multigenerational onion farm in New York’s Orange County — where he first worked as a 5-year-old, collecting onions that fell out of crates — was hemorrhaging money. Pawelski said he was growing roughly $200,000 worth of crops some years but took home only about $20,000, unable to negotiate higher prices with wholesale buyers that dominated the market.

Debt to suppliers and equipment vendors piled up, and the burden strained his marriage. He had little time for friends, working sunup to sundown seven days a week, desperately trying to preserve his family’s legacy.

“It’s all stuff collapsing down upon you,” he said. “It’s weeks, months, years of dealing with all sorts of pressures that you can’t alleviate.”

Pawelski started wondering what it would be like to get hit by a truck on the busy road in front of his house. “You think you’re already on your way out, so why wait?” he said.

  (Jeffrey Basinger for KFF Health News)

After his father died, Pawelski became his mother’s primary caregiver. Meanwhile he was struggling to preserve his farm — his family’s legacy. “It’s all stuff collapsing down upon you,” he says. (Jeffrey Basinger for KFF Health News)

Millions of Americans have serious thoughts of killing themselves, and tens of thousands die by suicide annually. Suicide repeatedly ranks among the top 10 leading causes of death — making the U.S. an outlier among developed nations.

Prevention efforts have typically focused on connecting individuals in crisis with treatment — despite therapy and medication being notoriously expensive, the healthcare system struggling to meet demand, and a consensus that suicide is caused by a host of factors, including but not limited to mental illness.

Now, many people working to prevent suicide, including some who have tried to harm themselves or lost a loved one to it, are calling for a broader approach. Some were galvanized by the covid pandemic, when rates of anxiety and depression spiked — not because everyone’s brain chemistry suddenly changed but because the world changed.