Mitchell noted that employers, which offer coverage to more than 160 million Americans, are a big player in the nation’s healthcare system — a role they came into because of “an accident of history,” she said.

“They weren’t looking to get into the healthcare business,” she continued, but “they were looking for alternatives to wages when there were limits on what they could offer, and they started with what was a pretty inexpensive offering — helping pay for hospital care — and that has now grown to be the second-largest line item in their budgets after payroll.”

Rovner and Mitchell discussed the fact that while large employers do have market power, the rest of the healthcare system banded together in response.

“There’s been this arms race of consolidation, meaning that even the largest employers in the world are smaller and don’t have the leverage many times,” Mitchell said.

Asked to identify the systemic changes large employers would like to see, Mitchell pointed to boosting primary care and referring patients to high-quality specialists. She said changes to business policies — in particular, banning anti-competitive practices and increasing price transparency — would help, too.

“We have a very real affordability crisis,” she said.

An abbreviated version of this interview aired July 16 during Episode 455 of What the Health? From ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News: “States Start Their Medicaid Cuts.”

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More and more Americans are being exposed to these parasites as climate change expands the range where they can survive. That means more people are also exposed to the bevy of health conditions they can cause, such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever, the alpha-gal-triggered red meat allergy, and, most common of all, Lyme disease.

For the latter, there may be some additional protection on the horizon. Pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Valneva they plan to seek regulatory approval for a vaccine to protect against Lyme disease. A for Lyme became available in the late 1990s but was pulled only three years later due to lawsuits, public fear of side effects, and a lack of interest.

It’s unclear whether this latest stab at a Lyme disease vaccine will get a warmer reception if it’s approved, especially in the postcovid era of vaccine skepticism.

For a sense of how it might go over with rural populations at high risk of Lyme, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News spoke with a group of hunters.

Few people spend more time in the woods exposed to ticks.

At the same time, as a collective, hunters , according to a survey from the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. And these are identities increased or vaccines, according to Ashley Kirzinger, associate director for Public Opinion and Survey Research at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News.

At the same time, few people spend more time in the woods exposed to ticks and the possibility of Lyme disease.

Left untreated, Lyme can cause a , from fevers, chills, and headaches to arthritis, shooting pains, and inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About in the U.S. may be diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease each year, the CDC says; that’s at least in part because the where cases have been reported has “expanded significantly” since 1995.

So would hunters get the Lyme vaccine if it became available?

“Given my proclivity for the outdoors, absolutely,” said Jess Manganelli, one of seven hunters (and one hiker) who spoke with ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News on a recent Saturday at the Busch Shooting Range in Weldon Spring, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis.

Of the eight, Manganelli, who had been hunting turkeys the weekend before, was the most positive toward the vaccine. Six others said they would consider it but would want more information about its safety and effectiveness as well as their risk for contracting the disease.

But Manganelli was the only one who believed she may have previously contracted Lyme disease, although she was never formally diagnosed with it. Two years ago, she experienced muscle weakness, tiredness, fatigue, swelling, and headaches after a tick bite, but when she went to urgent care she was told they didn’t test for Lyme.

Nearly all the hunters knew someone who had had Lyme disease — an old roommate, a family member, friends, a former student. Lyme can be and to treat and is often misdiagnosed at first. Many of the hunters witnessed their acquaintances navigating those challenges and struggling with sometimes debilitating symptoms.

That familiarity among the hunters in Missouri was unsurprising to author and conservationist Steven Rinella, host of the hunting show MeatEater.

“I’m a turkey hunter. In talking about turkey hunting, you talk about ticks as much as you talk about turkeys,” Rinella said. “Just the nature of turkey hunting puts you into exposure. You’re sitting for long periods of time trying to use vegetation for concealment.”

In fact, both Rinella and his older son contracted Lyme disease 13 years ago during a bluegill fishing trip in the Hudson Valley in New York. His son developed Bell’s palsy, a sudden paralysis on one side of the face, but recovered quickly after a course of oral antibiotics. Steven Rinella’s symptoms, on the other hand, lingered for months, leaving him unable to walk down stairs without a handrail or to ride a bike. He ended up receiving intravenous antibiotic treatments for a month.

“I thought my life had changed,” Rinella said, “but I recovered, as far as I know.”

That experience is one reason Rinella said he would absolutely consider getting a Lyme vaccine if it proved safe and provided considerable protection against the disease. Unlike with some other diseases, prior infection does not provide permanent immunity, so a person who has had Lyme could still benefit from a vaccine.

Knowledge of similar challenges influenced the thinking of the hunters in Missouri as well.

Jeremy Hollingshead said he may be less inclined to take a vaccine owing to his former roommate’s experience with Lyme disease, which is not to say the experience was pleasant. In fact, Hollingshead said he thinks his old pal is still dealing with lingering effects of it 10 years later. But Hollingshead has spent his whole life in the woods, and of hundreds of people he knows who have done the same, he knows of only one of them contracting Lyme.

“I know it was a bad outcome for him,” Hollingshead said, but he thinks the odds of getting Lyme himself seem pretty slim.

Meanwhile, Julian Barnes said seeing a relative struggle with Lyme makes him more open to a potential vaccine. It took a long time for doctors to come to that diagnosis, and finding a good treatment has been equally difficult.

“I would say I am vaccine-hesitant, generally speaking,” Barnes said. “But Lyme, I’ve seen the way it affects people in my life.”

“I would definitely have to really understand the vaccine, how it works,” Barnes added.

The new, four-dose vaccine candidate technically missed one of the bars set out in trials because Lyme. Still, the companies say it’s about 75% effective in reducing cases, and they plan to submit it to regulators for approval. A Pfizer spokesperson said there were no updates to share on the company’s regulatory efforts when contacted by ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News in June.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a noted anti-vaccine activist before taking over as head of the agency that oversees vaccine approvals, and he’s remade it in ways that have prompted some vaccine makers to on development.

But he’s also been an advocate on Lyme disease. In May, he announced an . And during his Senate confirmation hearings, he said his family had been deeply affected by Lyme disease and that than he would to find a vaccine or treatment.

If the vaccine is approved by the FDA, an endorsement from Kennedy would go a long way, according to KFF’s Kirzinger, particularly among supporters of his Make America Healthy Again movement, who tend to be more vaccine-skeptical.

“They trust him as much as they trust their own doctors to tell them what to do with their health and for health information,” Kirzinger said. “If he comes out as a strong proponent of this vaccine and says, ‘Look what my administration did, and we made this available,’ I would imagine there would be less vaccine resistance among that group.”

Kirzinger also said this vaccine could be ripe for misinformation. New polling from KFF shows people who don’t have a trusted medical provider as well as those who use social media and AI for health information are common vaccine myths.

Only one of the hunters who spoke with ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News said they definitely would not be interested in a Lyme vaccine if it became available.

“I kind of hand it off to God and the body he gave me. I’m pretty durable,” JP Cummings said. But even while he’s not interested in it for himself, he’s curious to see what his fellow hunters do as more information comes out.

“Hunters care about the wildlife; hunters care about health,” Cummings said. “They love the wildlife, they love their deer, and they love their fellow hunters.”

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Baldwin, who is a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said lawmakers have been forced to take unprecedented action to ensure the Trump administration properly spends taxpayer dollars.

“In this most recently passed bill that Donald Trump signed into law, we had to put guardrails that we’ve never had to put into our appropriations laws before to enforce our spending bills,” Baldwin said. “And those laws have made it clear that we expect that they must spend what we have appropriated, and not just all of it at the end of the fiscal year, but in a timely manner throughout the year.”

The conversation also addressed the success — and Trump-imposed limitations — of the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. The resource, which was created through a bipartisan effort, has led to a notable reduction in youth suicide, according to in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“It’s heartwarming to know that this work matters,” Baldwin said.

This interview aired May 14 on Episode No. 446 of What the Health? From ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News: “In Search of a New FDA Commissioner.”

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Read more coverage from our “Bill of the Month,” “Health Care Helpline,” and “Priced Out” series:

• “How To Make a High-Deductible Health Plan Work for You,” by Jackie Fortiér.
• “To Avoid Care Disruptions, Know When the Clock Runs Out on Your Prior Authorization,” by Sarah Boden.
• “So Your Insurance Dropped Your Doctor. Now What?” by Bram Sable-Smith.

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They discussed the pivotal role the president of the United States plays in health policy — whether it is building support for or opposition to new plans and proposals. “Presidents have a level of authority which is often underappreciated, especially in health care,” Blumenthal said.

Blumenthal and Rovner also discussed the historical reasons the U.S. has been unable to enact universal health care, incrementalism versus sweeping change, and what he described as “the dance” between proponents and opponents — usually a clear party-line split between Democrats and Republicans — of major health care reforms.

Today, the split seems to have come to a head, as public health, science, and expertise are being viewed by one end of the political spectrum as “the opposition,” Blumenthal said, which will complicate efforts. Still, he outlined ideas for moving forward.

An abbreviated version of this interview aired April 23 on Episode 443 of What the Health? From ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News: “RFK Jr. vs. Congress.”

Blumenthal’s latest book, Whiplash: From the Battle for Obamacare to the War on Science, co-written with James A. Morone, offers a behind-the-scenes look at how three presidential administrations pursued very different health policy goals.

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This year, executives from nearly every major health insurance company made the same declaration in calls with Wall Street analysts: Using artificial intelligence to make coverage decisions would help save them money.

Even the Trump administration is testing AI’s usefulness in managing the prior authorization process for the Medicare program, as well as seeking to override AI regulation by states.

But class action lawsuits have accused insurers of using AI to wrongfully withhold treatment. And outlines the risks of training AI on a current system rife with wrongful denials.

“There is a world in which using AI could make that worse, or at least replicate a bad human system, because the data that it would be training on is from that bad human system,” said Michelle Mello, a co-author of the study.

Although, Mello said, the research team found “real positives alongside the risks.”

In this video produced by ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News’ Hannah Norman, Darius Tahir, a correspondent covering health technology, explains.

You can read Tahir’s recent coverage of AI’s use by health insurers below:

• “Red and Blue States Alike Want To Limit AI in Insurance. Trump Wants To Limit the States,” by Darius Tahir and Lauren Sausser.
• “AI Will Soon Have a Say in Approving or Denying Medicare Treatments,” by Lauren Sausser and Darius Tahir.

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One year after taking charge of the nation’s health department, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hasn’t held true to many of he made while appealing to U.S. senators concerned about the longtime anti-vaccine activist’s plans for the nation’s care.

Kennedy squeaked through a narrow Senate vote to be confirmed as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, only after making a number of public and private guarantees about how he would handle vaccine funding and recommendations as secretary.

Here’s a look at some of the promises Kennedy made during his confirmation process.

The Childhood Vaccine Schedule

In two hearings in January 2025, Kennedy repeatedly assured senators that he supported childhood vaccines, noting that all his children were vaccinated.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) about the money he’s made in the private sector from lawsuits against vaccine makers and accused him of planning to profit from potential future policies making it easier to sue.

“Kennedy can kill off access to vaccines and make millions of dollars while he does it,” Warren said during the Senate Finance Committee hearing. “Kids might die, but Robert Kennedy can keep cashing in.”

Warren’s statement prompted an assurance by Kennedy.

“Senator, I support vaccines,” he said. “I support the childhood schedule. I will do that.”

Days later, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, declared Kennedy had pledged to maintain existing vaccine recommendations if confirmed. Cassidy, a physician specializing in liver diseases and a vocal supporter of vaccination, had questioned Kennedy sharply in a hearing about his views on shots.

“If confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ recommendations without changes,” Cassidy said during a speech on the Senate floor explaining his vote for Kennedy.

A few months after he was confirmed, Kennedy fired all the incumbent members of the vaccine advisory panel, known as ACIP, and appointed new members, including several who, like him, oppose some vaccines. The panel’s recommendations soon changed drastically.

Last month, the CDC removed its universal recommendations for children to receive seven immunizations, those protecting against respiratory syncytial virus, meningococcal disease, flu, covid, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and rotavirus. The move followed a memorandum from the White House calling on the CDC to cull the schedule.

Now, those vaccines, which researchers estimate have prevented thousands of deaths and millions of illnesses, are recommended by the CDC only for children at high-risk of serious illness or after consultation between doctors and parents.

In response to questions about Kennedy’s actions on vaccines over the past year, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said the secretary “continues to follow through on his commitments” to Cassidy.

“As part of those commitments, HHS accepted Chairman Cassidy’s numerous recommendations for key roles at the agency, retained particular language on the CDC website, and adopted ACIP recommendations,” Nixon added. “Secretary Kennedy talks to the chairman at a regular clip.”

Cassidy and his office have repeatedly rebuffed questions about whether Kennedy, since becoming secretary, has broken the commitments he made to the senator.

Vaccine Funding Axed

Weeks after Kennedy took over the federal health department, the CDC pulled back $11 billion in covid-era grants that local health departments were using to fund vaccination programs, among other initiatives.

That happened after Kennedy pledged during his confirmation hearings not to undermine vaccine funding.

Kennedy replied “Yes” when Cassidy asked him directly: “Do you commit that you will not work to impound, divert, or otherwise reduce any funding appropriated by Congress for the purpose of vaccination programs?”

A federal judge later ordered HHS to distribute the money.

The National Institutes of Health, part of HHS, also yanked dozens of research grants supporting studies of vaccine hesitancy last year. Kennedy, meanwhile, ordered the cancellation of a half-billion dollars’ worth of mRNA vaccine research in August.

A Discredited Theory About Autism

Cassidy said in his floor speech that he received a guarantee from Kennedy that the CDC’s website would not remove statements explaining that vaccines do not cause autism.

Technically, Kennedy kept his promise not to remove the statements. The website still says that vaccines do not cause autism.

But late last year, new statements sprung up on the same webpage, baselessly casting doubt on vaccine safety. “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism,” the now misleadingly reads.

The webpage also states that the public has largely ignored studies showing vaccines do cause autism.

That is false. Over decades of research, scientific studies have repeatedly concluded that there is no link between vaccines and autism.

A controversial 1998 study that captured global attention did link the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to autism. It was retracted for being fraudulent — though not until a decade after it was published, during which there were sharp declines in U.S. vaccination rates.

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Republicans have hitched themselves to the “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, banking on its popularity to give them an electoral bounce. But the strategy carries risks.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist who rails against Big Pharma and ultraprocessed food, is the leader of the movement. And Americans’ .

Plus, polls show about reducing health care costs than MAHA priorities such as ending vaccine mandates and promoting raw milk.

Enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expired at the end of 2025, fueling a nationwide affordability debate. Roughly 24 million people buy coverage on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, and many are now facing premium payments more than double what they faced last year.

After taking a political back seat in recent years, health care may dominate the 2026 election races.

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For those in or near Columbia Memorial, the city’s only hospital, there will soon be a different plan: Shelter in place. The hospital is building a new facility next door with an on-site tsunami shelter — an elevated refuge atop columns deeply anchored in the ground, where nearly 2,000 people can safely wait out a flood.

Oregon needs more shelters like the one that Columbia Memorial is building, emergency managers say. Hospitals in the region are likely to incur serious damage, if not ruin, and could take more than three years to fully recover in the event of a major earthquake and tsunami, according to .

Columbia Memorial’s current facility is a single-story building, a half-century ago, that would likely collapse and sink into the ground or be swallowed by a landslide after a major earthquake or a tsunami, said Erik Thorsen, the hospital’s chief executive.

“It is just not built to survive either one of those natural disaster events,” Thorsen said.

At least 10 other hospitals along the Oregon coast are in danger as well. So Columbia Memorial leaders proposed building a hospital capable of withstanding an earthquake and landslide, with a tsunami shelter, instead of relocating the facility to higher ground. Residents and state officials supported the plans, and the federal government awarded a $14 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help pay for the tsunami shelter.

The project broke ground in October 2024. Within six months, the Trump administration had , known as Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, calling it “yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program … more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters.”

Molly Wing, director of the expansion project, said losing the BRIC grant felt like “a punch to the gut.”

“We really didn’t see that coming,” she said.

This summer, Oregon and 19 other states sued to restore the FEMA grants. On Dec. 11, a that the Trump administration had unlawfully ended the program without congressional approval.

The administration did not immediately indicate it would appeal the decision, but Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said by email: “DHS has not terminated BRIC. Any suggestion to the contrary is a lie. The Biden Administration abandoned true mitigation and used BRIC as a green new deal slush fund. It’s unfortunate that an activist judge either didn’t understand that or didn’t care.” FEMA is a subdivision of DHS.

Columbia Memorial was one of the few hospitals slated to receive grants from the BRIC program, which had announced more than $4.5 billion for nearly 2,000 building projects since 2022.

Hospital leaders have decided to keep building — with uncertain funding — because they say waiting is too dangerous. With the Trump administration reversing course on BRIC, fewer communities will receive help from FEMA to reduce their disaster risk, even places where catastrophes are likely.

More than three centuries have passed since a major earthquake caused the Pacific Northwest’s coastline to drop several feet and unleashed a tsunami that crashed onto the land in January 1700, according to scientists who study the evolution of the Oregon coast.

The greatest danger is an underwater fault line known as the , which lies 70 to 100 miles off the coast, from Northern California to British Columbia.

The Cascadia zone can produce a megathrust earthquake, with a magnitude of 9 or higher — the type capable of triggering a catastrophic tsunami — , according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Scientists predict a 10% to 15% chance of such an earthquake along the fault zone in the next 50 years.

“We can’t wait any longer,” Thorsen said. “The risk is high.”

Building for the Future

The BRIC program started in 2020, during the first Trump administration, to provide communities and institutions with funding and technical assistance to fortify their structures against natural disasters.

Joel Scata, a senior attorney with the environmental advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council, said the program helped communities better prepare so they could reduce the cost of rebuilding after a flood, tornado, wildfire, or extreme weather event.

To qualify for a grant, a hospital had to show that the project’s benefits were greater than the future danger and cost. In some cases, that benefit might not be readily apparent.

“It prevents bad disasters from happening, and so you don’t necessarily see it in action,” Scata said.

Scata noted that the Trump administration has also stopped awarding grants through FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, which predates BRIC.

“There really is no money going out the door from the federal government to help communities reduce their disaster risk,” he said.

A recent ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News investigation using proprietary data from Fathom, a global leader in flood modeling, found that at least 170 U.S. hospitals are at risk of significant and potentially dangerous flooding from more intense and frequent storms. That count did not include Columbia Memorial, as Fathom’s data did not account for tsunamis. It models flooding from rivers, sea level rise, and extreme rainfall.

In recent days, an atmospheric river — a narrow storm band carrying significant amounts of moisture — dumped more than 15 inches of rain on parts of Oregon and Washington, causing catastrophic flooding along rivers and the coast. In the Washington town of Sedro-Woolley, which sits along the Skagit River, the PeaceHealth evacuated nonemergency patients.

High winds battered Astoria, leaving the city with some minor landslides, according to news reports. But flooding on the road to the nearby beach town of Seaside made the drive nearly impassable.

The Trump administration is leaning on states to take greater responsibility for recovering from natural disasters, Scata said, but most states are not financially prepared to do so.

“The disasters are just going to keep on piling up,” he said, “and the federal government’s going to have to keep stepping in.”

A Hospital at Risk

Columbia Memorial is blocks from the southern shore of the Columbia River, near the Washington border, where the include earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, and floods. A critical access hospital with 25 beds, it opened in 1977 — before state building codes addressed tsunami protections.

Thorsen said the new facility and shelter would be a “model design” for other hospitals. Design plans show a five-level hospital built atop a foundation anchored to the bedrock and surrounded by concrete columns to shield it from tsunami debris.

The shelter will be on the roof of the second floor, above the projected maximum tsunami inundation. It will be accessible via an outdoor staircase and interior staircases and elevators, with enough room for up to 1,900 people, plus food, water, tents, and other supplies to sustain them for five days.

With most patient care provided on the second and third levels, generators on the fourth level, and utility lines underground, the hospital is expected to remain operational after a natural disaster.

Thorsen said an earthquake and tsunami threaten not only vast flooding , in which the ground loosens and causes structures above it to collapse. Deep foundations, thick slabs, and other structural supports are expected to protect the new hospital and tsunami structure against such failure.

Through the years, hospital administrators and civic leaders in Astoria have sought other locations for Columbia Memorial. But relocation wasn’t economical. Columbia Memorial committed to invest in a new hospital and tsunami shelter to protect not only patients and staff but also nearby residents.

“Your community should count on your hospital to be a safe haven in a natural disaster,” Thorsen said.

Fighting To Restore Funds

The estimated construction budget for Columbia Memorial’s expansion is $300 million, mostly financed through new debt from the hospital. The tsunami shelter is budgeted at about $20 million, for which FEMA’s BRIC program , with a $6 million matching grant from the state, which has maintained its support.

The shelter and the building’s structural protections — featuring reinforced steel, deeper foundations, and thicker slabs — are integral to the design and cannot be removed without compromising the rest of the structure, said Michelle Checkis, the project architect.

“We can’t pull the TVERS [tsunami vertical evacuation refuge structure] out without pulling the hospital back apart again,” she said. “It’s kind of like, if I was going to stack it up with Legos, I would have to take all those Legos apart and stack it up completely differently.”

Columbia Memorial has sought help from Oregon’s congressional delegation. In to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and former FEMA acting administrator David Richardson, the lawmakers demanded that the agencies restore the hospital’s grant.

The hospital’s leadership is seeking other grants and philanthropic donations to make up for the loss. As a last resort, Thorsen said, the board will consider removing “nonessential features” from the building, though he added that there is little fat to trim from the project.

The in July alleged that FEMA lacks the authority to cancel the BRIC program or redirect its funding for other purposes.

The states argued that canceling the program and undermined projects underway.

In their response to the lawsuit, the Trump administration said repeatedly that the defendants “deny that the BRIC program has been terminated.”

The lawsuit cites examples of projects at risk in each state due to FEMA’s termination of the grants. Oregon’s first example is Columbia Memorial’s tsunami shelter. “Neither the County nor the State can afford to resume the project without federal funding,” the lawsuit states.

In response to questions about the impact of canceling the grant on Astoria and the surrounding community, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said BRIC had “deviated from its statutory intent.”

“BRIC was more focused on climate change initiatives like bicycle lanes, shaded bus stops, and planting trees, rather than disaster relief or mitigation,” McLaughlin said. DHS and FEMA provided no further comment about BRIC or the Astoria hospital.

Preparing for a Tsunami Disaster

Located near the end of the Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail, Astoria sits on a peninsula that juts into the Columbia River near the Pacific Ocean.

Much of the city is not in the tsunami inundation area. But Astoria’s downtown commercial district — where gift shops, hotels, and seafood restaurants line the streets — is nearly all an evacuation zone.

Two hospitals — Ocean Beach Health in nearby Washington, and Providence Seaside Hospital in Oregon — are about 20 miles from Columbia Memorial. Both are 25-bed hospitals, and neither is designed to withstand a tsunami.

Ocean Beach Health regularly conducts drills for mass-casualty and natural disasters, said Brenda Sharkey, its chief nursing officer.

“We focus our planning and investments on areas where we can make a real difference for our community before, during, and after an event — such as maintaining continuity of care, ensuring rapid triage, and coordinating with regional emergency partners,” Sharkey said in an email.

Gary Walker, a spokesperson for Providence Seaside, said in a statement that the hospital has a “comprehensive emergency plan for earthquakes and tsunamis, including alternative sites and mobile resources.”

Walker added that Providence Seaside has hired “a team of consultants and experts to conduct a conceptual resilience study” that would evaluate the hospital’s vulnerabilities and recommend ways to address them.

Oregon’s emergency managers advise residents and visitors in coastal communities to immediately seek higher ground after a major earthquake — and not to rely on tsunami sirens, social media, or most technology.

“There may not even be cellphone towers operating after an event like this,” said Jonathan Allan, a coastal geomorphologist with the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries. “The earthquake shaking, its intensity, and particularly the length of time in which the shaking persists, is the warning message.”

The stronger the earthquake and the longer the shaking, he said, the more likely a tsunami will head to shore.

A tsunami triggered by a Cascadia zone earthquake could strike land in , according to state estimates.

Many of Oregon’s seaside communities are near high-enough ground to seek safety from a tsunami in a relatively short time, Allan said. But he estimated that, to save lives, Oregon would need about a dozen vertical tsunami evacuation shelters along the coast, including in seaside towns that attract tourists and where the nearest high ground is a mile or more away.

Willis Van Dusen’s family has lived in Astoria since the mid-19th century. A former mayor of Astoria, Van Dusen stressed that tsunamis are not a hypothetical danger. He recalled seeing one in Seaside in 1964. The wave was only about 18 inches high, he said, but it flooded a road and destroyed a bridge and some homes. The memory has stayed with him.

“It’s not like … ‘Oh, that’ll never happen,’” he said. “We have to be prepared for it.”

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News correspondent Brett Kelman contributed to this report.

This <a target="_blank" href="/health-industry/tsunami-shelter-oregon-hospital-fema-funding-cut-lawsuit/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

LOUISVILLE, Tenn. — When a big storm hits, Peninsula Hospital could be underwater.

At this decades-old psychiatric hospital on the edge of the Tennessee River, an intense storm could submerge the building in 11 feet of water, cutting off all roads around the facility, according to a sophisticated computer simulation of flood risk.

Aurora, a young woman who was committed to Peninsula as a teenager, said the hospital sits so close to the river that it felt like a moat keeping her and dozens of other patients inside. ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News agreed not to publish her full name because she shared private medical history.

“My first feeling is doom,” Aurora said as she watched the simulation of the river rising around the hospital. “These are probably some of the most vulnerable people.”

Covenant Health, which runs Peninsula Hospital, said in a statement it has a “proactive and thorough approach to emergency planning” but declined to provide details or answer questions.

Peninsula is one of about 170 American hospitals, totaling nearly 30,000 patient beds from coast to coast, that face the greatest risk of significant or dangerous flooding, according to a months-long ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News investigation based on data provided by Fathom, a company considered a leader in flood simulation. At many of these hospitals, flooding from heavy storms has the potential to jeopardize patient care, block access to emergency rooms, and force evacuations. Sometimes there is no other hospital nearby.

Much of this risk to hospitals is not captured by flood maps issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which have served as the nation’s de facto tool for flood estimation for half a century, despite being incomplete and sometimes decades out of date. As FEMA’s maps have become divorced from the reality of a changing climate, private companies like Fathom have filled the gap with simulations of future floods. But many of their predictions are behind a paywall, leaving the public mostly reliant on free, significantly limited government maps.

“This is highly concerning,” said Caleb Dresser, who studies climate change and is both an emergency room doctor and a Harvard University assistant professor. “If you don’t have the information to know you’re at risk, then how can you triage that problem?”

The deadliest hospital flooding in modern American history occurred 20 years ago during Hurricane Katrina, when the bodies of 45 people were recovered from New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center, including some patients whom investigators . More flooding deaths were narrowly avoided one year ago when helicopters rescued dozens of people as Hurricane Helene engulfed Unicoi County Hospital in Erwin, Tennessee.

Rebecca Harrison, a paramedic, called her children from the Unicoi roof to say goodbye.

“I was scared to death, thinking, ‘This is it,’” Harrison told CBS News, which interviewed Unicoi survivors as part of ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News’ investigation. “Alarms were going off. People were screaming. It was chaos.”

The investigation — among the first to analyze nationwide hospital flood risk in an era of warming climate and worsening storms — comes as the administration of President Donald Trump has slashed and and also dismantled FEMA programs designed to protect hospitals and other important buildings from floods.

When asked to comment, FEMA said flooding is a common, costly, and “under appreciated” disaster but made no statement specific to hospitals. Spokesperson Daniel Llargués defended the administration’s changes to FEMA by reissuing an August statement that dismissed criticism as coming from “bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency.”

Alice Hill, an Obama administration climate risk expert, said the Trump administration’s dismissal of climate change and worsening floods would waste billions of dollars and endanger lives.

In 2015, Hill led the creation of the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, which required that hospitals and other essential structures be elevated or incorporate extra flood protections to qualify for federal funding.

FEMA  the standard in March.

“People will die as a result of some of the choices being made today,” Hill said. “We will be less prepared than we are now. And we already were, in my estimation, poorly prepared.”

‘Flood Risk Is Everywhere’

The ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News investigation identified more than 170 hospitals facing a flood risk by comparing the locations of more than 7,000 facilities to , a United Kingdom company that simulates flooding in spaces as small as 10 meters using laser-precision elevation measurements from the .

Hospitals were determined to have a significant risk if Fathom’s 100-year flood data predicted that a foot or more of water could reach a considerable portion of their buildings, excluding parking garages, or cut off road access to the hospital. A 100-year flood is an intense weather event that has roughly a 1% chance of occurring in any given year but can happen more often.

The investigation found heightened flood risks at large trauma centers, small rural hospitals, children’s hospitals, and long-term care facilities that serve older and disabled patients. At least 21 are critical access hospitals, with the next-closest hospital 25 miles away, on average.

Flooding threatens dozens of hospitals in coastal areas, including in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and New York. Farther inland, flooding of rivers or creeks could envelop other hospitals, particularly in Appalachia and the Midwest. Even in the sun-soaked cities and arid expanses of the American West, storms have the potential to surround some hospitals with several feet of pooling water, according to Fathom’s data.

These findings are likely an undercount of hospitals at risk because the investigation overlooked pockets of potential flooding at some hospitals. It excluded facilities like stand-alone ERs, outpatient clinics, and nursing homes.

“The reality is that flood risk is everywhere. It is the most pervasive of perils,” said Oliver Wing, the chief scientific officer at Fathom, who reviewed the findings. “Just because you’ve never experienced an extreme doesn’t mean you never will.”

Dresser, the ER doctor, said even a small amount of flooding can shut down an unprepared hospital, often by interrupting its power supply, which is needed for life-sustaining equipment like ventilators and heart monitors. He said the most vulnerable hospitals would likely be in rural areas.

“A lot of rural hospitals are now closing their pediatric units, closing their psychiatry units,” Dresser said. “In a financially stressed situation, it can be hard to prioritize long-term threats, even if they are, for some institutions, potentially existential.”

Urban hospitals can face dangerous flooding, too. Fathom’s data predicts 5 to 15 feet of water around neighboring hospitals — Kadlec Regional Medical Center and Lourdes Behavioral Health — that straddle a tiny creek in Richland, Washington.

By Fathom’s estimate, a 100-year flood could cause the nearby Columbia River to spill over a levee that protects Richland, then loosely follow the creek to the hospitals. Some of the deepest flooding is estimated around Lourdes, which was built on land the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers set aside in 1961 as a “ponding and drainage easement.”

At the time, this land was supposed to be capable of storing enough water to fill at least 40 Olympic-size swimming pools, according to obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. A mental health facility has occupied this spot since the 1970s.

Both Kadlec and Lourdes said in statements that they have disaster plans but did not answer questions about flooding. Tina Baumgardner, a Lourdes spokesperson, said government flood maps show the hospital is not in a 100-year flood plain.

This is not uncommon. Of the more than 170 hospitals with significant flood risk identified by ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News, one-third are located in areas that FEMA has not designated as flood hazard zones.

Sometimes the difference is stark. For example, at Ochsner Choctaw General in Alabama — the only hospital for 30 miles in any direction — FEMA maps suggest a 100-year flood would overflow a nearby creek but spare the hospital. Fathom’s data predicts the same event would flood most of the hospital with 1 to 2 feet of water, including the ER and the helicopter pad.

Ochsner Health did not answer questions about flooding preparations at Choctaw General.

FEMA flood maps were launched in the ’60s as part of the National Flood Insurance Program to determine where insurance is required and building codes should include flood-proofing. According to a FEMA statement, the maps show only a “snapshot in time” and are not intended to predict where flooding will or won’t happen.

FEMA spokesperson Geoff Harbaugh said the agency intends to modernize its maps through the Future of Flood Risk Data initiative, which will enable the agency to “better project flood risk” and give Americans “the information they need to protect their lives and property.”

The program was launched by the first Trump administration in 2019 but has since received sparse public updates. Harbaugh declined to provide a detailed update or timeline for the program.

Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, said it is unknown whether FEMA is still trying to upgrade its maps under Trump, as the agency has cut off communications with outside flooding experts.

“There has been not a single bit of loosening of what I’m calling the FEMA cone of silence,” Berginnis said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Floods are expected to worsen as a warming climate fuels stronger storms, drenching areas that are already flood-prone and bringing a new level of flooding to areas once considered lower risk.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said that 2024 was the warmest year on record — more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the 20th-century average. Scientists across the globe that each degree of global warming correlates to a 4% increase in the intensity of extreme rainfall.

“Warmer air can hold more moisture, so this leads us to experience heavier downpours,” said Kelly Van Baalen, a sea level rise expert at the nonprofit . “A 100-year flood today could be a 10-year flood tomorrow.”

Intensifying storms raise concerns about Peninsula Hospital, which has operated for decades mere feet from the Tennessee River but has no known history of flooding.

Peninsula spokesperson Josh Cox said the river is overseen by the Tennessee Valley Authority, which uses dams to manage water levels and generate electricity. Estimates provided by the TVA suggest the dams could keep Peninsula dry even in a 500-year flood.

Fathom, however, said its flood simulation accounts for the dams and stressed that a large enough storm could drop more rain than even the TVA could control. These predictions are echoed by another flood modeling firm, , which also says an intense storm could cause more than 10 feet of flooding in the area around Peninsula.

“It’s a hospital right on the banks of a major American river,” said Wing, the Fathom scientist. “It just isn’t conceivable that such a location is risk-free.”

Jack Goodwin, 75, a retired TVA employee who has lived next to Peninsula for three decades, said he was confident the dams could protect the area. But after reviewing Fathom’s predictions, Goodwin began to research flood insurance.

“Water can rise quickly and suddenly, and the destruction is tremendous,” he said. “Just because we’ve never seen it here doesn’t mean we won’t see it.”

‘All the Elements of a Real Disaster’

One year ago, as Hurricane Helene carved a deadly path across Southern Appalachia, Angel Mitchell was visiting her ailing mother at Unicoi County Hospital in the tiny town of Erwin, Tennessee.

Swollen by Helene, the nearby Nolichucky River spilled over its banks and around the hospital, which was built in a flood plain. Staff tried to bar the doors, Mitchell said, but the water got in, trapping her and others inside. The lights went out. People fled to the roof, where the roar of rushing water nearly drowned out the approach of rescue helicopters, Mitchell said.

Ultimately, 70 people from the hospital, including Mitchell and her mother, were airlifted to safety on Sept. 27, 2024. The hospital remains closed, and the company that owns it, Ballad Health, has said its .

“Why allow something — especially a hospital — to be built in an area like that?” Mitchell told CBS News. “People have to rely on these areas to get medical help, and they’re dangerous.”

Beyond Unicoi, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News identified 39 inland hospitals — including 16 in Appalachia — that Fathom predicts could flood when nearby rivers, creeks, or drainage canals overspill their banks, even in storms far less intense than Helene.

For example, in the Cumberland Mountains of southwestern Virginia, a 100-year flood is projected to cause Slate Creek to engulf Buchanan General Hospital in more than 5 feet of water.

Near the Great Lakes in Erie, Pennsylvania, LECOM Medical Center and Behavioral Health Pavilion could become flooded by a small drainage creek that is less than 50 feet from the front door of the ER.

Neither Buchanan nor LECOM responded to questions about flooding or preparations.

And in West Virginia’s capital of Charleston, where about 50,000 people live at the junction of two rivers in a wide and flat valley, a single storm could potentially flood five of the city’s six hospitals at once, along with schools, churches, fire departments, and other facilities.

“I hate to say it,” said Behrang Bidadian, a flood plain manager at the , “but it has all the elements of a real disaster.”

At the largest hospital in Charleston, CAMC Memorial Hospital, Fathom predicts that the Kanawha River could bring as much as 5 feet of flooding to the ER. Across town, the Elk River could surround CAMC Women and Children’s Hospital, cutting off all exits.

And in the center of the city, where the overflowing rivers are predicted to merge, Thomas Orthopedic Hospital could be besieged by more than 10 feet of water on three sides.

WVU Medicine, which owns Thomas Orthopedic Hospital, did not respond to requests for comment.

CAMC spokesperson Dale Witte said the hospital system is aware of its flood risk and has prepared by elevating electrical infrastructure and acquiring flood-proofing equipment, like a deployable floodwall. CAMC also regularly revises and drills its disaster plans, Witte said, although he added that hospitals there have never been tested by a real flood.

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Shanen Wright, 48, a lifelong Charleston resident who lives near CAMC Memorial, said many in the city have little worry about flooding in the face of more immediate problems, like the opioid epidemic and the decline of manufacturing and mining.

Tugboats and coal barges sail past his neighborhood as if they were cars on his street.

“It’s not to say it’s not a possibility,” he said. “I’m sure the people in Asheville and the people in Texas, where the floods took so many lives, they probably didn’t see it coming either.”

‘The Water Is Coming’

Despite wide scientific consensus that climate change fuels more dangerous weather, the Trump administration has that concerns about global warming are overblown. In a speech to the United Nations in September, Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

The Trump administration has made deep staff and funding cuts to FEMA, NOAA, and the National Weather Service. At FEMA, the cuts prompted 191 current and former employees to in August warning that the agency is being dismantled from within.

Daniel Swain, a University of California climate scientist, said the administration’s rejection of climate change has left the nation less prepared for extreme weather, now and in the future.

“It’s akin to enforcing malpractice scientifically,” Swain said. “Imagine making a medical decision where you are not allowed to look at 20% of the patient’s vital signs or test results.”

Under Trump, FEMA has also taken actions critics say will leave the nation more vulnerable to flooding, specifically:

• FEMA disbanded the Technical Mapping Advisory Council, which had to modernize its flood maps to estimate future risk and account for the impacts of climate change.
• FEMA canceled its program, which provided grants to help communities and vital buildings, including hospitals, protect themselves from floods and other natural disasters.
• And after stopping enforcement early this year, FEMA the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, which was designed to harden buildings against future floods and save tax dollars in the long run.

Berginnis, of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, said the administration’s unwillingness to prepare for climate change and worsening storms would result in a dangerous and costly cycle of flooding, rebuilding, and flooding again.

“The president is saying we are closed for business when it comes to hazard mitigation,” Berginnis said. “It bugs me to no end that we have to have reminders — like people dying — to show us why it’s important to make these investments.”

FEMA did not answer specific questions about these decisions. In the statement to ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News, spokesperson Llargués touted the administration’s response to flooding in Texas and New Mexico and said FEMA had provided billions of dollars to help people and communities recover and rebuild. He did not mention any FEMA funding for protecting against future floods.

Few hospitals understand this threat more than the former Coney Island Hospital in New York City, which has suffered catastrophic flooding before and has prepared for it to come again.

Superstorm Sandy in 2012 forced the hospital to evacuate hundreds of patients. When the water receded, fish and a sea turtle were found in the building.

Eleven years later, the facility reopened as Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hospital, transformed by a FEMA-funded $923 million reconstruction project that added a 4-foot floodwall and elevated patient care areas and utility infrastructure above the first floor.

It is now likely one of the most flood-proofed hospitals in the nation.

But, so far, no storm has tested the facility.

Svetlana Lipyanskaya, CEO of NYC Health+Hospitals/South Brooklyn Health, which includes the rebuilt hospital, said the question of flooding is “not an if but a when.”

“I hope it doesn’t happen in my lifetime,” she said, “but frankly, I’d be surprised. The water is coming.”

Methodology

After Hurricane Helene made landfall a year ago, a raging river flooded a rural hospital in eastern Tennessee. Patients and employees were rescued from the rooftop. Floods have hit hospitals from New York to Nebraska to Texas in recent years. We wanted to determine how many other U.S. hospitals face similar peril. Ultimately, we found more than 170 hospitals at risk.

For this analysis, we used data from , a United Kingdom-based company that specializes in flood-risk modeling across the globe. To assess the United States’ vulnerability, Fathom uses sophisticated computer simulations and detailed terrain data covering the country. It accounts for environmental factors such as climate change, soil conditions, and many rivers and creeks not mapped by other sources. Fathom’s modeling has been and , the World Bank, the Nature Conservancy, and government agencies in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere. The Iowa Flood Center has .

Through a data use agreement, Fathom shared its U.S. mapping data that predicts areas with at least a 1% chance of flooding in any given year. Fathom’s data estimates the effects of of flooding: coastal, fluvial (from overflowing rivers, lakes, or streams), and pluvial (rainfall that the ground can’t absorb). The data also accounts for dams, reservoirs, and other structures that defend against floods.

To identify at-risk hospitals, we used a publicly available Department of Homeland Security database containing the GPS coordinates of more than 7,000 short-term acute, critical access, rehab, and psychiatric hospitals — basically any hospital with inpatient services. (DHS under the Trump administration has discontinued public access to the database, so data for hospitals and other infrastructure is no longer widely available.)

Using GPS coordinates as the centerpoint, we created a circle with a 150-yard radius around each hospital, which in most cases captured the building plus nearby grounds and access roads. We then mapped Fathom’s flood-risk data to see where it overlapped with these circles. We started by looking for hospitals where at least 20% of the circle’s area had a predicted flood depth of at least 1 foot. That gave us an initial list of more than 320 hospitals across the U.S.

From there, we visually inspected those hospitals using mapping software and Google Maps, both satellite and street view. We trimmed our list to only the hospitals where a considerable portion of the building or all access roads were predicted to have at least a foot of flooding.

If two hospitals were mapped to the same building — for instance, a small rehab facility within a large hospital — we counted only one hospital. We also excluded hospitals recently converted to nursing homes or for other uses.

We ended up with a list of 171 hospitals across the U.S. That is most likely an undercount. Some hospitals could still face significant impact from flooding that is not deep enough or widespread enough to fit our methodology. Our analysis also does not account for how flooding farther from a hospital could affect employees or patients. And it does not assess what steps hospitals may have already taken to prepare for severe weather events.

We also ran a spatial analysis comparing Fathom’s data with flood hazard maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which in many cases are incomplete or haven’t been updated in years. We found that about a third of hospitals identified as flood risks by Fathom’s data did not overlap at all with FEMA’s 100- or 500-year hazard areas.

Fathom provided guidance and feedback as we developed our analysis.

CBS News correspondent David Schechter, photojournalist Chance Horner, and producer Aparna Zalani contributed to this report.

This <a target="_blank" href="/health-industry/hospital-flooding-risk-investigation-trump-policies-fema/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">