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  • RFK Jr. misses mark in touting rural health transformation fund as historic infusion of cash

    At a September Senate hearing, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. boasted about a rural health initiative within President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.“

    “It’s going to be the biggest infusion of federal dollars into rural health care in American history,” Kennedy said, responding to criticism from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Sanders said the law would harm patients and rural hospitals.

    Kennedy was referring to the law’s five-year, $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program, HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said. GOP lawmakers have made similar claims about the program. 

    The fund was added to the bill at the last minute to secure support from Republican lawmakers who represent rural states. Some were concerned about how the bill’s Medicaid cuts would harm rural America, where more than 150 hospitals have stopped offering inpatient services or been shuttered completely since 2010, according to the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina.

    “The transformation fund was really talked about in the context of saving rural hospitals that would be facing these significant Medicaid cuts,” said Carrie Cochran-McClain, National Rural Health Association chief policy officer. Medicaid is the joint state-federal health insurance program that primarily covers low-income people and those with disabilities.

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    So is Kennedy right in his description of the rural health fund as a historic cash infusion, or does it fail to acknowledge critical context?

    The Rural Health Transformation Program 

    Trump’s tax and spending law is expected to reduce federal Medicaid spending in rural areas by at least $137 billion by 2034, according to an analysis by KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. The Congressional Budget Office predicts the law will increase the overall number of uninsured patients by 10 million by 2034.

    Rural health facilities disproportionately rely on Medicaid reimbursement to stay afloat. In 2023, 40.6% of children and 18.3% of adults under age 65 from rural areas and small towns were enrolled in Medicaid, according to the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University. In metro areas, the rates were 38.2% and 16.3%, respectively.

    The Trump administration argues that rural hospitals cannot rely on “legacy” funding sources like Medicaid and Medicare due to the programs’ reimbursement structure, which ties payments to the number of services provided, a model that’s not financially sustainable for rural facilities with typically low patient volumes.

    “Distinct from these other programs, the Rural Health Transformation Program is designed to provide a flexible source of investment” to promote innovation, efficiency, and sustainability, the White House wrote in a memo.

    Here’s how it works: States can propose projects spearheaded by state agencies, health care providers, consultants, and vendors aimed at various purposes, such as improving technology, access to care, and workforce recruitment.

    States can use only 15% of their transformation program funding for provider payments and can direct money to non-rural areas, according to KFF. 

    Half of the $50 billion will be evenly divided among states whose applications are approved — regardless of their rural and overall populations — according to the “Notice of Funding Opportunity” for the program.

    The other half will be awarded based on “the transformative possibilities” of states’ grant proposals; how much they’ve committed to aligning their health policies with the Trump administration’s; and data on their rural population, rural health facilities, uncompensated care, and other measurements.

    The application deadline is Nov. 5. 

    The big picture

    Michael Meit, director of the Center for Rural Health and Research at East Tennessee State University, said the rural health community is excited about the innovations the new program might foster, but he’d “love for it to happen in the absence of these cuts that are going to devastate our rural health system.”

    “It’s not going to fill the hole,” Meit said.

    KFF estimates that the rural health fund’s five-year, $50 billion investment is a little over a third of the expected loss of federal funding in rural areas that will be spread over 10 years. According to that analysis, Medicaid cuts over that period would tally at least $137 billion in rural areas.

    That number doesn’t account for other reductions stemming from the same law, such as cuts to the ACA Marketplaces or the health-system revenue loss expected from an increase in the number of people without insurance.  

    These factors are important to note because the rural health program is a temporary initiative while reductions in federal spending are long-term.   

    Another issue is the difference in the program’s spirit. The rural health fund is focused on transforming the rural health care system — not providing continued funding to keep facilities open or making up for lost Medicaid funds. Even if it triggers successful innovations, there are doubts that those will happen in time to prevent rural health facilities from closing.

    “There’s a real misperception that somehow these funds are going to be able to save rural America or save rural hospitals,” Cochran-McClain said.

    Joseph Antos, a health policy expert and senior fellow emeritus at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said Kennedy’s comment is something “politicians say when they want to ignore the rest of the policies.”

    “What they wanted was to say that they were creating a new program,” Antos said. “Well, this is a very inefficient way to distribute a relatively very small amount of money to hospitals that will incur much larger bad debt over the coming years, thanks to the cuts in Medicaid.”

    One caveat

    Experts said that when viewed outside of mandatory programs like Medicare and Medicaid, the $50 billion rural health fund does appear to be unrivaled, especially for a limited, five-year program. 

    Several mentioned the Hill-Burton Act as another program that significantly boosted rural health care. The law provided loans and grants that modernized or built 6,800 health facilities, many of which were in rural areas, from 1946 to 1997, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration.

    Incomplete funding data makes it difficult to account for inflation, said Kelsey Moran, an assistant professor and health economist at the University of Miami.

    But she estimated that, during the life of the program, it spent $47 billion in 2024 dollars when using the Consumer Price Index, or $109 billion when using the CPI’s medical care index. The medical index has a higher inflation rate because health prices have risen more than overall prices.

    Our ruling 

    Kennedy said the rural health fund is “going to be the biggest infusion of federal dollars into rural health care in American history.”

    The statement contains an element of truth because the new program could be the most significant one-time investment in rural health funding.

    But it ignores critical facts and context that create a different impression.

    Federal contributions to rural areas from Medicaid and Medicare easily dwarf this program’s $50 billion mark. The new fund offers states flexibility in how they can allocate resources, meaning there’s no guarantee that all the new funding will go to rural Americans’ health care. The program comes at the same time rural areas are expected to lose far more from Medicaid cuts and an increase in uninsured patients than what the rural health fund infusion can backfill.

    Experts say the rural health fund’s cash infusion is canceled out by other parts of Trump’s tax and spending law that call for cuts and policy changes.

    We rate this statement Mostly False. 

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  • Vance rewrites history about Trump and Obamacare

    Vance rewrites history about Trump and Obamacare

    Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, on Sept. 15 told viewers of NBC’s “Meet the Press” that former President Donald Trump built up the Affordable Care Act, even though he could have chosen to do the opposite.

    “Donald Trump had two choices,” Vance, Trump’s running mate, said. “He could have destroyed the program, or he could actually build upon it and make it better so that Americans didn’t lose a lot of health care. He chose to build upon a plan, even though it came from his Democratic predecessor.”

    The remarks follow statements the former president made during his Sept. 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris in Philadelphia. Trump said of the Affordable Care Act, “I saved it.”

    The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, has grown more popular as Americans have increasingly used it to gain health coverage. More than 20 million people are enrolled this year in plans sold through the marketplaces it created. That makes the law a tricky political issue for Republicans, who have largely retreated from their attempts over the last decade to repeal it.

    Both Vance and Trump’s statements are false. We contacted Vance’s campaign; it provided no additional information. But here’s a review of policies related to the Affordable Care Act that Trump pursued as president. 

    So what did Trump do with the ACA?

    Most of the the Trump administration’s Affordable Care Act-related actions involved cutting the program, including reducing by millions of dollars funding for marketing and enrollment assistance and backing the many failed efforts in Congress and the courts to overturn the law. In June 2020, for example, the administration asked the Supreme Court to overturn the law in a case brought by more than a dozen GOP states. The high court eventually rejected the case.

    “The fact the ACA survived the Trump administration is a testament to the strength of the underlying statutory framework, and that the public rallied around it,” said Sabrina Corlette, co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.

    Most Affordable Care Act provisions took effect in 2014, during Barack Obama’s presidential administration.

    Average premium costs, already rising when Trump took office, jumped for some plans in 2018, before beginning a modest decline for the rest of his term, according to statistics from KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.

    Some of those increases were tied to a 2017 Trump administration decision to stop making payments to insurers intended to reduce deductibles and copayments for people with low to moderate incomes. By law, though, insurers still had to offer the plans.

    Two months earlier, the Congressional Budget Office warned that stopping the payments could cause some insurers to leave the ACA marketplace — and that premiums would rise by 20% in the first year.

    Most states, however, let insurers make up for the lost payments by adding to monthly premiums. That had the unintended effect of increasing federal subsidies for people who buy Affordable Care Act plans, because the subsidies are tied to the cost of premiums. 

    “By accident, that gave people cheaper access to better coverage in the exchange plans,” said Joe Antos, a senior fellow emeritus with the American Enterprise Institute.

    Some Republicans think Trump deserves credit for this improvement. 

    But Larry Levitt, KFF’s executive vice president for health policy, said that wasn’t the Trump administration’s intention. 

    “The one time when Trump improved the ACA, it was an unintended consequence of an attempt to weaken it,” he said.

    Meanwhile, the Trump administration expanded access to some kinds of less expensive  health coverage that isn’t compliant with Affordable Care Act rules, including short-term plans that generally have more restrictions on care and can leave consumers with surprise medical bills. Democrats call the plans “junk insurance.”

    Brian Blase, president of the Paragon Health Institute, a conservative health research group, said broader access to cheaper, less comprehensive plans helped more people get coverage. The plans’ critics say that if they had attracted too many healthy people from ACA-compliant insurance, increases could have spiked for people who remained.  

    Trump also supported congressional repeal-and-replace efforts, all of which failed — including on the memorable night when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., helped kill the effort with a thumbs-down vote. The Trump administration never issued its own replacement plan, despite the former president’s many promises that he would.

    Trump, during the debate with Harris, said that he has “concepts of a plan” to replace Obamacare and that “you’ll be hearing about it in the not-too-distant future.”

    On “Meet the Press,” host Kristen Welker asked Vance when Trump’s plan would be ready. He didn’t answer directly, but said it would involve  “deregulating the insurance market.”

    Democrats and policy critics say that’s code for letting insurers do business as they did pre-ACA, when sick people could be denied coverage or charged exorbitant premiums based on preexisting conditions. 

    Our ruling

    Vance’s assertion that Trump as president took steps to build upon the Affordable Care Act and protect the health coverage of 20 million Americans is simply not supported by the record.

    Trump administration policies, for example, didn’t buttress the act, but often undermined enrollment outreach efforts or were advanced to sabotage the insurance marketplace. Also, Trump vocally supported congressional efforts to overturn the law and legal challenges to it. 

    By the numbers, Affordable Care Act enrollment declined by more than 2 million people during Trump’s presidency, and  the number of uninsured Americans rose by 2.3 million, including 726,000 children, from 2016 to 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That includes three years of Trump’s presidency.

    We rate Vance’s statement False.

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  • PolitiFact – No proof a study found lab-grown meat funded by Bill Gates causes ‘turbo cancer’

    PolitiFact – No proof a study found lab-grown meat funded by Bill Gates causes ‘turbo cancer’

    A truck with a turbocharged engine boasts enhanced performance and fuel efficiency. TurboTax is one option for filing tax returns online. Turbo cancer … doesn’t exist.

    But that didn’t prevent Instagram users from sharing alarming claims about a meat alternative Feb. 22. 

    “Study Reveals Bill Gates’ Fake Meat Causes ‘Turbo Cancers’ in Humans,” read the post’s caption. “Bill Gates’ lab-grown meat causes cancer in humans who consume it, according to a disturbing new study.” 

    An image accompanying the post showed Gates, who co-founded Microsoft Corp., and a screenshot that purported to show something Gates posted on X: “Cancers found in fake meat are totally harmless to humans.” 

    This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

    (Screenshot from Instagram.)

    Gates, a billionaire who has invested heavily in charities and climate research, has invested in companies creating meat substitutes using plant-based ingredients and laboratory technology. 

    The original article with a headline that matched the Instagram post was published Feb. 23, 2023, on The People’s Voice, a website that has spread misinformation before. We’ve fact-checked the site’s false headlines numerous times, and Baxter Dmitry — who is credited with writing the article — is a byline seen often on misinformation sites. 

    The article doesn’t cite a specific study that supports its claims that “fake” or lab-grown meat causes cancer. 

    It linked to a Bloomberg News article about some lab-grown meat companies’ use of “immortalized cells,” or cells that proliferate indefinitely. Cancer researchers told Bloomberg News that “because the cells aren’t human, it’s essentially impossible for people who eat them to get cancer from them, or for the precancerous or cancerous cells to replicate inside people at all.”

    Bloomberg News noted that there are no long-term health studies backing the scientific consensus that immortalized cells are safe to consume. Bloomberg News also said “there’s no evidence that cultured meat cells are going to become cancerous in a diner’s body.” 

    Scientists who study cultivated meat told The Associated Press that it’s inaccurate to say that immortalized cells used to create lab-grown meat are cancerous.

    The People’s Voice article also linked to a Children’s Health Defense article about a protein used in plant-based Impossible Burgers; it did not mention lab-created meat. Children’s Health Defense is an anti-vaccine legal advocacy group created by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

    Neither the Bloomberg News nor the Children’s Health Defense articles contained the word “turbo” or the phrase “turbo cancer.” The term “turbo cancer” was popularized by anti-vaccine activists, who’ve repeatedly claimed — contrary to available evidence — that COVID-19 vaccines cause unusually aggressive, fast-growing cancer. 

    PolitiFact searched the Nexis database for news reports containing mentions of “turbo cancer” and “lab-grown meat,” and found nothing.

    Also, an advanced X search for the comment Gates allegedly posted about “cancers found in fake meats” showed no results.

    Our ruling

    An Instagram post claimed a study revealed “Bill Gates’ Fake Meat Causes ‘Turbo Cancers’ in Humans.” 

    We found neither reliable studies nor news reports supporting the claim that lab-grown meat causes fast-growing cancer that some people are calling “turbo cancer.” 

    We traced this claim back to an article on a website known for spreading misinformation. That article did not provide the study that purportedly supported the claim and it showed no proof that lab-grown meat is unsafe. 

    We rate this claim False.

    RELATED: What Bill Gates has to do with livestock, lab-grown meat

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  • PolitiFact – No, radiation poisoning does not cause COVID-19

    PolitiFact – No, radiation poisoning does not cause COVID-19

    COVID-19 is a viral infection spread through contact with an infected person. It is not caused by radiation poisoning, as one social media post claimed.

    An Instagram video shows a person talking about illnesses’ root causes. The video‘s background shows a graphic that says COVID-19’s “root cause” is radiation poisoning. 

    “2020,” the man says in the video. “Remember that whole thing? Radiation poisoning. Loss of smell, loss of taste, loss of hair, nausea, symptoms of radio wave sickness.”

    This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

    COVID-19 is caused by the SARS-CoV–2 coronavirus according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

    It is spread through close contact with an infected person when small respiratory particles are passed between people, the World Health Organization says. The CDC says people can sometimes contract COVID-19 through droplets on contaminated surfaces that they touch. 

    The first four cases of COVID-19 were reported in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, when a local hospital identified “pneumonia of an unknown etiology.” In January 2020, COVID-19’s complete viral genetic sequence was released to some public health organizations, the CDC Museum COVID-19 Timeline shows. 

    The International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection issued a statement in 2020 that electromagnetic field exposure “does not cause COVID-19, nor does it have any effect on the disease process or health outcomes of those who are infected by the new corona virus.”

    In 2021, we rated False a claim that connected radiation from wireless technologies with COVID-19. That post referred to a research paper, but the paper’s authors wrote that “none of the observations discussed here prove this linkage.” 

    According to the Mayo Clinic, exposure to a high dose of radiation causes radiation poisoning. It is rare and most cases occurred after nuclear industrial accidents such as the explosion of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Radiation poisoning symptoms include nausea and vomiting, hair loss, fever, diarrhea, headache, weakness and fatigue. 

    The CDC lists COVID-19’s symptoms as fatigue, fever, diarrhea, headache, nausea or vomiting, new loss of taste or smell and sore throat.

    Although some COVID-19 symptoms are also symptoms of radiation poisoning, they are not connected. 

    We rate the claim that COVID-19 is caused by radiation poisoning False.  

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  • PolitiFact – Congressman off base in ad claiming Fauci shipped COVID-19 to Montana a year before it was detected

    PolitiFact – Congressman off base in ad claiming Fauci shipped COVID-19 to Montana a year before it was detected


    A fundraising ad for U.S. Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., shows a photo of Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, behind bars, swarmed by flying bats.

    Rosendale, who is eyeing a challenge to incumbent Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat, maintains that a Montana biomedical research facility, Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, has a dangerous link to the pandemic. This claim is echoed in the ad:

    “It’s been revealed that Fauci brought COVID to the Montana one year before COVID broke out in the U.S.!,” it charges in all-caps before asking readers to, “Donate today and hold the D.C. bureaucracy accountable!”

    The ad, paid for by Matt Rosendale for Montana, seeks contributions through WinRed, a platform that processes donations for Republican candidates. Rosendale also shared the fundraising pitch Nov. 1 on his X account, and it remained live as of early February.

    Rosendale made similar accusations on social media, during a November speech on the U.S. House floor, and through his congressional office. Sometimes his comments, like those on the House floor, are milder, saying the researchers experimented on “a coronavirus” leading up to the pandemic. Other times, as in an interview with One America News Network, he linked the lab’s work to COVID-19’s spread.

    In that interview clip, Rosendale recounted pandemic-era shutdowns before saying, “And now we’re finding out that the National Institute of Health, Rocky Mountain Lab, down in Hamilton, Montana, had also played a role in this.”

    Rosendale’s statements echo broader efforts to scrutinize how research into viruses happens in the United States and is part of a continued wave of backlash against scientists who have studied coronaviruses. Rosendale is considering seeking the Republican nomination to challenge Tester, in a toss-up race that could help determine which party controls the Senate in 2025. Political newcomer Tim Sheehy is also seeking the Republican nomination for the Senate.

    Rosendale proposed amendments to a health spending bill that would ban pandemic-related pathogen research funding for Rocky Mountain Laboratories and cut the salary of one of its top researchers, virologist Vincent Munster, to $1. The House has included both amendments in the Health and Human Services budget bill that the Republican majority hopes to pass. A temporary spending bill is funding the health department until March.

    We contacted Rosendale’s congressional office multiple times — with emails, a phone call, and an online request — asking what proof he had to back up his statements that the Montana lab infected bats with COVID-19 from China before the outbreak. We got no reply.

    Kathy Donbeck, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Office of Communications and Government Relations, said in an email that the ad’s claims are false. Interviews with virologists and a review of the research paper published shortly before Rosendale’s assertions support that position. 

    Where this is coming from

    Rosendale’s statements seem to stem from a Rocky Mountain Laboratories study from 2016 that looked into how a coronavirus, WIV1-CoV, acted in Egyptian fruit bats. The work, published by the journal Viruses in 2018, showed the specific strain didn’t cause a robust infection in the bats. 

    The study did not receive widespread attention at the time. But on Oct. 30, 2023, the study was highlighted by a blog called White Coat Waste Project, which says its mission is to stop taxpayer-funded experiments on animals. Some right-wing media outlets began to connect the Montana lab with the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

    Rosendale’s office issued an Oct. 31 news release saying the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China “shipped a strain of coronavirus” to the Hamilton lab. “Our government helped create the Wuhan flu, then shut the country down when it escaped from the lab,” Rosendale said.

    It’s a different virus

    Rocky Mountain Laboratories is a federally funded facility as part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the nation’s top infectious disease research agency, which Fauci led for nearly 40 years.

    According to the study and Donbeck’s email, the Montana researchers focused on a coronavirus called WIV1-CoV, not the COVID-19-causing SARS-CoV-2. They’re different viruses.

    “The genetics of the viruses are very different and their behavior biologically is very different,” said Troy Sutton, a virologist with Pennsylvania State University who has studied the evolution of pandemic influenza viruses.

    In a review of media reports on the Montana study, Health Feedback, a network of scientists that fact-checks health and medical media coverage, showed the virus’s lineage indicated that WIV1 “is not a direct ancestor or even a close relative of SARS-CoV-2.”

    Additionally, the description of the coronavirus strain as being “shipped” suggests that it physically traveled across the world. That’s not what happened.

    The Wuhan Institute of Virology provided the WIV1 virus’s sequence that allowed researchers to make a lab-grown copy. A separate study, published in 2013 by the journal Nature, outlines the origins of the lab-created virus.

    According to the study’s methodology, the researchers used a clone of WIV1. An NIAID statement to Lee Enterprises, a media company, said the virus “was generated using common laboratory techniques, based on genetic information that was publicly shared by Chinese scientists.”

    Stanley Perlman, a University of Iowa professor who studies coronaviruses and serves on the federal advisory committee that reviews vaccines, said Rosendale’s claim is off base.

    He said Rosendale’s focus on where the lab got its materials is irrelevant and serves “only to make people wary and scared.”

    Rosendale’s efforts to prohibit particular research at Rocky Mountain Laboratories appear ill-informed, too. Rosendale targeted banning gain-of-function research, which involves altering a pathogen to study its spread. In her email, NIAID’s Donbeck said the Rocky Mountain Laboratories study didn’t involve gain-of-function research.

    This type of research has long been controversial, and people who study viruses have said the definition of “gain of function” is problematic and insufficient to show when research, or even work to create vaccines, could cross into that type of research.

    But both Sutton and Perlman said that, any way you look at it, the Rocky Mountain Laboratories study published in 2018 didn’t change the virus.It put a virus in bats and showed it didn’t grow.

    And it had no effect on the COVID-19 outbreak a year later, first detected in Washington state.

    Our ruling

    Rosendale’s ad said, “It’s been revealed that Fauci brought COVID to the Montana one year before COVID broke out in the U.S.” The campaign ad and Rosendale’s similar statements refer to research at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories involving WIV1, a coronavirus researchers say is not even distantly close in genetic structure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused COVID-19. 

    Rosendale’s claim is wrong about when the scientists began their work, what they were studying, and where they got the materials. The researchers began their work in 2016 and, although they were studying a coronavirus, it wasn’t the virus that causes COVID-19. The Montana scientists used a lab-grown clone of WIV1 for their research. The first laboratory-confirmed case of COVID-19 was not detected in the U.S. until Jan. 20, 2020.

    Rosendale’s ad is inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!





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