Americans are spending more and more time alone, and more than a third reported experiencing “serious loneliness" in 2021. The director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development -- the longest study of human life ever conducted -- concluded in a new book that close personal relationships are the "one crucial factor [that] stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health and longevity." A lack of those relationships can actually have an impact on political behavior and interest in extreme ideologies. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke speaks with the director of the Harvard study, Robert Waldinger, about the lessons his findings have for politics in America.
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Medicaid, known as Medi-Cal in California, makes up about 40% of revenue for Community Health Centers, which serve almost 32 million mostly low-income people nationwide.
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GOP Funding Bill Could Put CA Rural Health Centers, Hospitals at Risk
Jun 09, 2025
People who depend on Community Health Centers and rural hospitals could have trouble finding care if Medicaid cuts just approved by the U.S. House are signed into law.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated 8 million people nationwide could lose coverage over the next decade, including more than 3 million in California.
Lizette Escobedo, vice president of government relations and civic engagement at AltaMed Health Services in Los Angeles, said the costs to treat a flood of uninsured patients would overwhelm community clinics and small town hospitals.
"If this bill were to be implemented over the next 10 years, some federally qualified health centers and hospitals especially in the rural areas would probably have to close their doors," Escobedo projected.
Supporters of the bill said the savings are needed to fund other administration priorities, including President Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts. The bill would also tighten work requirements for Medicaid coverage and force people to reapply every six months instead of annually. And it would slash tens of billions in federal funding to states like California allowing health coverage for undocumented people.
Joe Dunn, chief policy officer for the National Association of Community Health Centers, called the proposed cuts counterproductive, in terms of keeping people healthy and keeping costs down.
"Health centers actually save money in the long run, because it reduces utilization of emergency departments and other kind of higher-cost settings, like inpatient hospitalization," Dunn explained.
The bill is now in the U.S. Senate.
GOP Funding Bill Could Put CA Rural Health Centers, Hospitals at Risk was originally published by the Public News Service and is republished with permission.
Suzanne Potter is a journalist with 30 years of experience as a reporter for TV, radio and print news.
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Rich Harwood: A Philosophy of Civic Faith
Jun 08, 2025
Rich Harwood is the president and founder of The Harwood Institute.
The organization's mission is to nurture a world where community is a common and enduring enterprise – where everyone can come together amid their differences to solve the complex challenges that affect us all.
I spoke with Rich, whose columns are frequently published on the Fulcrum. He was a guest on a recent episode of the Fulcrum Democracy Forum (FDF). The program engages citizens in shaping a more effective government to better meet the needs of all people. Consistent with Fulcrum's mission, FDF strives to share diverse perspectives to broaden our audience's viewpoints.
He shared the work the institute leads, including his philosophy of civic faith.
"How does change actually happen in a way that both addresses what really matters to people and that strengthens the civic culture of communities," Rich said. "One of the discoveries that we've made is that the biggest predictor of whether communities move forward it's actually the civic culture of our communities and whether or not we have the right kind of enabling environment that allows change to take root and grow and spread over time."
We also spoke about his new book, "The New Civic Path." "I wrote it because I believe that we as a country are stuck, and at the same time that people are hungry for an alternative path forward. We don't need more divisive politics, but that I believe we need a new civic path, a path that begins in our local communities and brings us together," Rich said.
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Dedicated to transforming public and political lives by supporting individuals, organizations, and communities in their quest to create change, Rich told us about the four things that inspire his work, including frustration. "Too many nonprofits are afraid to get dirt under their fingernails and do the really difficult work that we need to do in really difficult places. And that too many of us live off of soft money and aren't creating the impact we say we are. I was frustrated by that, and I wanted to see whether or not something else could happen."
SUGGESTIONS:
Michael Rivera: The Importance of Getting Involved
Gregg Amore: Faith in Democracy
Nate Gilliam: Love & Frustration
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum. He is the publisher of the Latino News Network and an accredited Solutions Journalism and Complicating the Narratives trainer with the Solutions Journalism Network.
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Unrecognizable person clinging to a fence deprived of freedom
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Selective Sympathy: America’s Racial Double Standard on South African Asylum
Jun 08, 2025
It's a peculiar feeling to see the United States, a nation built on the bones of the oppressed, suddenly rebrand itself as a sanctuary for the persecuted as long as those seeking refuge are white. The current executive branch of the American government has managed to weaponize the language of human rights for its own geopolitical and racial ends— that is, selective, self-serving, misguided, and immoral.
The Trump administration is sullying the name of America, with barely a fig leaf of evidence, by trumpeting allegations of "genocide" against white South Africans. The chorus rises from right-wing newsrooms to the halls of Congress, fueled by viral videos and the breathless retelling of farm attacks, stripped of historical context or statistical rigor. White South Africans are an endangered species, so told, and America must fling open its doors, granting not just asylum but a fast track to citizenship—no questions asked.
Contrast this with the labyrinth of cruelty that greets Black and brown asylum seekers from Haiti, Central America, the Middle East, or sub-Saharan Africa. For them, there are cages, deportations, and endless bureaucratic purgatory. For white South Africans, there is welcome. There is sympathy. There is an open hand.
I've seen South Africa—its pain, promise, unfinished struggle—up close. In my Fulcrum article, I wrote about my post-apartheid travels, the complicated dance of reconciliation, and the everyday heroism of ordinary South Africans, Black and white, who have refused to let the wounds of history fester into new cycles of vengeance. My cross-cultural work and conversations with survivors, clergy, activists, and families across townships and suburbs all tell a story far more nuanced than the caricature circulating in Washington.
Yes, South Africa is a country haunted by violence. Due chiefly to its legacy of apartheid, centuries of land theft, and economic exclusion. But why, then, does this administration fixate on South Africa? Why the sudden urge to play the benevolent savior to white refugees while ramping up barriers against everyone else? We all know the answer. In America, whiteness still confers an almost magical power to transform suffering—real or imagined—into moral urgency.
By elevating the plight of white South Africans, the administration feeds the anxieties of its base, stokes the flames of racial resentment, and distracts from its failure to confront domestic racism. The narrative of "white genocide" conveniently erases the ongoing economic and social violence faced by Black South Africans while allowing American politicians to posture as champions of human rights. However, there is a cost for selective morality.
A moral democracy assumes every person, regardless of race or origin, should have the right to seek refuge from violence and persecution. Yet the present federal approach is not about principle; it is about power. The Trump administration's policy is not grounded in a careful assessment of need or risk; it is animated by an old and ugly logic, one that privileges whiteness and treats Black and brown lives as disposable.
I've visited with South Africans—white, Black, and "colored"—whose lives have been touched by violence. I've visited the inner cities and the rural and affluent communities where fear and hardship are a daily reality. But I've also seen the tenacity of reconciliation, the struggle for justice, the messy, unfinished work of building a nation out of the ashes of apartheid. Truthfully, it is not up to Americans—least of all American politicians who have less than informed working knowledge of cultural life in Johannesburg, Soweto, Hoedspruit, Pretoria, or Cape Town—to define or distort the reality of contemporary South Africa. And it is certainly not the role of the U.S. government to selectively amplify one group's suffering while erasing or minimizing the suffering of others.
There exists a reality behind the rhetoric. Credible researchers—including the South African Human Rights Commission and independent international observers—have found no evidence of a government campaign to exterminate white South Africans. Farm murders, tragic as they are, represent a fraction of the country's overall violent crime, which overwhelmingly affects Black South Africans. Nevertheless, the Trump
administration has ignored these findings, preferring the sensationalism of viral hoaxes and the lobbying of far-right interest groups. It's no coincidence that the loudest voices calling for white South African asylum are the same ones who championed the Muslim ban or who cheered on the mass deportation of Haitian refugees last year.
A call of conscience is before our nation. Together, we must challenge this nation's leaders and all those who enable its policies to answer for this betrayal of our deepest ethical commitments. America cannot claim to champion global human rights while practicing racial triage at its borders. We cannot claim to have moved beyond our apartheid-like practices while importing its logic into our laws.
Moreover, if we are serious about justice, we must extend the same dignity and protection to all who seek refuge—not just those whose suffering flatters our prejudices. We must listen to the people of South Africa, in all their diversity, and resist the temptation to reduce their reality to propaganda.
Rev. Dr. F. Willis Johnson is a spiritual entrepreneur, author, scholar-practioner whose leadership and strategies around social and racial justice issues are nationally recognized and applied.
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What our nation needs is a broad-based, pro-democracy civic movement
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The America I Love
Jun 07, 2025
The country that I love is behaving like a spoiled child. There is a new approach to governance in the American government that replaces trust with fear, understanding with punishment, and reason with retribution.
After World War II, the United States became the moral standard for the world. We weren’t perfect, but we were way ahead of most of the rest of the world. We were self-serving and primarily looked out for our own interests, but we achieved this by being helpful to other nations, not through cruelty and deception, and we were not vindictive.
Following World War II, President Truman initiated the Marshall Plan to aid in the reconstruction of Europe. We had seen what exacting retribution on Germany after World War I had done. Seeking reparations had bankrupted our former enemies and created conditions in Europe that fostered a bitterness towards the victors, leading to dictatorship and a desire to replace the shame of losing the war with a policy of nationalistic hatred and revenge. It almost succeeded. Eventually, American strength and resolve were all that stopped it.
America did well by doing good. We were powerful, but we shared the power. We were prosperous, and we helped other nations prosper as well. We were self-serving, but we served others. Why? Because gratitude is more enduring than envy, and trust is stronger than fear.
In the name of America, we did great things for most of the world. We were looked up to.
Those days are gone
And the road back, if we ever decide to take it again, will be a long one. Like an unfaithful spouse, forgiveness can come quickly, but trust takes years and years to rebuild.
And what has been the purpose, the motivation that propelled us into this darkness? Imagined slights and wrongs that have led to government attacks on our greatest assets. You can dismiss the quest of learning for the sake of knowledge alone, but there’s a lot of money to be made by exploiting that knowledge through capitalizing it. You can dismiss “diversity” whatever you believe that to mean, but if you want to replace it with uniformity, you have some excellent examples to show you the way, like China and Russia, where individualism is criminal behavior.
The danger of having a leader with no comprehension of how governments work, with no understanding of how nations interact, gives us a leader whose greatest knowledge of those things is seen through “The Art of the Deal” and how deal-making works. That is, who comes out ahead in the short run. But in the long run, it is trust that matters, not how you can manipulate others on occasion.
The problem is that winning in the short run does not do anything for those of us who are going to be living in the long run. Trump may be good at what he does, but is it good for the rest of us?
Since the end of World War II, the United States has maintained stability in the world order for 80 years. We were the only nation to do so consistently. Did we do it because we were just being nice? No, we did it because when other nations prosper through an economic stability guaranteed by America, America prospers, too, economically and morally.
It was good while it lasted.
A version of this column was first published in the Daily Inter Lake.
Jim Elliott served 16 years in the Montana Legislature as a state representative and state senator. He lives on his ranch in Trout Creek.
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