Stories

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius teamed with U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) on Tuesday to pitch health care reform as one of the few remaining ways to level the playing field for many Americans who reside in rural areas.

Expanding insurance coverage is important, experts say, but that is only half the battle. For many Americans, particularly in rural parts of the country, access to high quality health care services could remain elusive even after insurance becomes available.

Gas prices are clearly affecting  small-town motorists’ decisions to hit the road as driving on rural interstates fell 7 percent over the last year, reports the Center for Rural Strategies’ Daily Yonder Web site.
High gas prices and a generally spooky economy have curtailed Americans’ driving this summer, across Yonder most of all.
The Federal Highway Administration, [...]

Rural Americans, of both the bitter and optimistic variety, really don’t have much of a problem with Barack Obama’s closed-door (but open-mike) characterizations of many of us.

We are exhausted with two weeks of effete urban commentators, caffeinated with $4 lattes and speaking through studio-makeup-shined faces, telling us what we think about what Obama said.

And, yes, [...]

The editor of an Austin, Texas-based online rural issues Web site has enlisted the support of savvy Wall Streeters to develop a rural stock index to measure its performance against other investment indices and economic data.
What Bill Bishop, editor of the Center For Rural Strategies’ Daily Yonder, hopes to learn from the intriguing experiment is [...]

CARROLL — The Whitesburg, Kentucky-based national Center for Rural Strategies this afternoon interviewed Iowa Independent fellow Douglas Burns about the impact of the war in Iraq on rural America, which is doing a disproportionate share of the fighting and dying.
Officials at the center had read Burns’ recent Iowa Independent piece “What Barack Obama gets about [...]