Rural-urban broadband access gap grows; telcos rely on wireless, maybe not the answer in the hills

The U.S. faces a growing broadband gap between rural and urban markets, and narrowing that gap could improve the overall economic health of the country, according to a new Hudson Institute report. Very few rural areas have access to high-speed Internet, and things could get worse if large telecommunications companies like Verizon back out of expanding digital subscriber line services, reports Karl Bode of Broadband DSL Reports.

The report says improved broadband infrastructure in rural areas would lead to improved medical care, increased opportunities, stronger businesses and a healthier economy. It concludes by saying the broadband gap means "a loss of opportunities for those who live where technology is used less and a loss of economic potential for those who make the products and service that would close the gap." It continues: "Because communication technology continues to advance, the gap can only grow unless investment continues in the places where the capabilities are furthest behind."

Companies aren't investing in rural broadband because the rate of return is slower there, Bode writes, and the report offers no possible solutions to remedy that problem. Meanwhile, he writes, AT&T and Verizon "are letting unwanted DSL users flee to cable, empowering a new, bolder cable monopoly," and regulators are placing "all their hopes on wireless broadband -- which may be an egregious error," because there are wireless coverage gaps across the country, which are harder to fill in rural areas. (Read more)

Swing-state rural voters prefer Republican Farm Bill

Since the failure of the Republican-led House to pass a Farm Bill before the September 30 deadline, Democrats running for office in rural districts have been using it as ammunition. Whether that makes rural voters pick Democrats on election day is yet to be seen, but in the latest National Rural Assembly and Center for Rural Strategies poll of rural voters in nine swing states, voters preferred the Republican approach over the Democratic one, 61 to 27 percent.

The poll described the Democratic position this way: "Democrats have said allowing the Farm Bill to expire is devastating for rural America. The Farm Bill supports rural development programs, invests in renewable energy industry, and provides an important safety net for farmers and producers. It would especially help those suffering for record drought. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also called food stamps, not only helps feed people, but 14 cents per dollar of the money from this program goes into the pockets of farmers."

It described the Republican position like this: "Republicans have said they want to pass a Farm Bill that is helpful to farmers and rural communities. Eighty percent of the current Farm Bill goes to fund the food stamp program, which is in dire need of reform. The number of people on food stamps has increased by 59 percent under President Obama, and the program is filled with waste and fraud. Many other provisions of the Farm Bill are badly outdated. We need a modern Farm Bill focused on helping farmers."

Voters polled said the Republican approach was closer to their view by a 34-point margin. "We should point out that not many rural voters actually have anything to do with farming," reports Bill Bishop of the Daily Yonder, which is published by the center. Only 7 percent of those polled said they or someone in their family made more than half their income from farming, and 12 percent said they received less than half of it from farming. Eight of 10 said no one in their families made any income from agriculture. (Read more)

Swing-state rural voters prefer Romney by 22 pts.

Mitt Romney is now leading President Obama in rural swing states by a 22-point margin, according to a National Rural Assembly poll released today. Rural voters polled last week said they preferred Romney to Obama by 59 to 37 percent. In a similar poll from September, Romney led by 14 points. The poll questioned voters in rural counties in nine states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin. (Daily Yonder photo: Romney speaks in Lebanon, Ohio)

"The poll documents a continuing -- in fact, accelerating -- collapse of support for President Obama among rural voters," Bill Bishop of the Daily Yonder reports. Rural voters were "staunchly Republican" in 2000 and 2004, when George W. Bush won the rural vote by almost 20 points. Obama lost the rural vote in 13 swing states in 2008 by just a little more than 2 percentage points, Bishop writes. North Star Opinion Research's Dan Judy told Bishop the September poll showed Romney was "under-performing" among rural voters, but now that he's surged ahead, Judy said he thinks "it's fair to say his lead among these rural voters is what's helping him in swing states overall."

The poll asked which candidate would do a better job handling a range of issues, from the economy to medicare. "Voters thought Romney would do a better job than Obama in addressing every issue -- often by enormous margins," Bishop reports. Judy told Bishop he expects these margins to stand through the election because rural voters have "innate conservatism" that will push them to vote Republican. (Read more)

Federal criminal justice spending 'steadily declining;' How dependent is your local agency?

The U.S. Department of Justice has reduced funding for state and local criminal justice agencies by 43 percent over the last two years, according to a National Criminal Justice Association and Vera Institute of Justice report. Failure to resolve the national budget crisis could make things worse, the report says. This likely has a disproportionate impact on rural agencies who have less resources and oftentimes depend on federal money to operate.

Agencies "on the front lines of the justice system, including police," fear that cuts in spending would practically end federal criminal justice funding by 2021, reports Ted Gest of The Crime Report. Federal funding for state and local anti-crime efforts is "at a historically low level," the report said, with more than three-fourths of agencies surveyed saying their federal aid has been steadily declining. Fourteen percent of survey respondents said their federal grants have been cut by more than half. (Read more)

Health reform said to hurt rural doctor recruitment

Recruiting doctors to rural hospitals will get harder in the next few years as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act reaches full implementation and the demand for healthcare services increases, a new report suggests. An Association of Staff Physician Recruiters report, "In-House Physician Recruitment Benchmarking," says interview-to-hire ratios in rural areas are much higher than in urban, and rural recruiting officers are often responsible for several things, not just hiring new doctors, making them overworked. Both factors make it harder for rural hospitals to recruit, the authors concluded. (University of Chicago photo)

ASPR Benchmarking Committee Chair Shelly Tudor told John Commins of HealthLeaders Media that the cost of recruitment is rising, making it hard for rural hospitals to compete with their urban counterparts. "In lots of respects, the process favors urban providers. Physicians are coming to urban areas and they are looking for jobs, whereas rural providers have to go out and target physicians that are likely to come to their area," Tudor said. Rural recruiters have to "filter through a lot of people to find the right one who is willing to come in and even look at the opportunity," she said. (Read more)

Rural areas are more dependent on public radio, TV

In the first presidential debate, Mitt Romney said he would cut federal funding for public broadcasting. Public television and radio outlets, including PBS and National Public Radio, received just $445 million of the 2012 budget, about .014 percent. In The Washington Post, Brad Plumer reflected on the importance of public broadcasting, and argued that if the budget is cut, rural areas would suffer the most.

"The usual arguments in favor of public broadcasting focus on the facts that a) public television and radio are highly educational and b) that this government spending mainly benefits rural areas with few other media options," Plumer writes. The government doesn't actually give money to PBS or NPR, he notes; it gives it to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which parcels out the money based on a formula. A lot of it goes to TV programming, the rest goes to 581 local TV and radio stations across the U.S.

PBS would lose just 15 percent of its budget, and NPR just 2 percent if Congress eliminated the public broadcasting budget. But local stations in many rural areas might be forced to close or drastically cut back their programming because more than 50 percent of their funding comes from the government. Plumer says that would be bad for children in rural areas who have only three options for educational programming: Nick Jr., Disney Jr. and PBS. "For families that can't afford cable, PBS is the only option," Plumer wrote. "The big worry is that an end to government funding would leave pockets of the country without public radio and TV, replaced by commercial stations that are less affordable, more saturated with advertising, and less educational." (Read more)

4 states have Census count inmates of rural prisons where they lived when convicted; to what effect?

For a myriad of reasons, prisons are more often based in rural areas than in urban settings. And for another set of reasons, those inmates in those prisons have typically been counted by the Census Bureau at their incarceration addresses rather than their last known home addresses. Maybe that shouldn't matter much in elections, because most prisoners can't vote, but some urban lawmakers say it "gives rural areas with prisons more representation than they deserve," Maggie Clark reports for Stateline, the news service of the Pew Center on the States.

This is more relevant than ever since the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed the right of states "to adjust census data for redistricting purposes, which could encourage more of them to change their count for the 2020 census," Clark notes. Maryland, New York, Delaware and California have passed laws since 2010 to count prisoners at their last known addresses.

Some wonder if the heavy administrative workload of reworking the system is worth the effort. Some insist that prisoner redistricting will have limited political effect. But others believe that the point is that people should be counted accurately. “Even marginal impact is justice to the individuals in question,” says Justin Levitt, a redistricting expert and associate professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “Much like every vote counts even when single votes rarely decide elections, every bit of representation counts even when people don’t feel the change in boundaries.” (Read more)

The swing state vote based on rural unemployment numbers requires state-by-state analysis

The bundle of swing states -- Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida -- include quite a few rural voters. And if, as they tell us, the presidential election will be decided by those states, it might just be a matter of who has jobs there and who doesn't. But you have to look at each state, notes Bill Bishop at the Daily Yonder, because the picture is different every time you cross a state line. "You can see why Obama feels more confident in Iowa, which is doing relatively well. And the President is running behind in North Carolina, in part, no doubt, to the rotten unemployment figures in the state's rural and exurban counties," Bishop writes. "Southern Virginia is doing poorly — and we've seen a lot of attention there from both campaigns. Mitt Romney has been talking about coal and mining jobs, an appeal that must resonate in southern Ohio and southwestern Virginia. Romney has been making similar arguments in rural Colorado, which shows signs of a weak economy. Rural Florida is not doing particularly well, but we haven't seen a response aimed at these rural counties as of yet."

Presidential candidates don't focus on rural issues

"As they campaign, presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney pretty much ignore rural-specific issues," even though they have plenty of opportunity to focus on those issues, Don Davis of the Grand Forks Herald reports, noting that some major swing states that are frequent stops on campaign trails are "heavy on agriculture."

The House Agriculture Committee ranking Democrat, Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, told Davis that the gist of each candidate's stance on agriculture is this: Mitt Romney favors fewer regulations, as do many rural residents; Obama is better at supporting the Farm Bill, which includes disaster relief for farmers and funding for rural development projects. University of North Dakota economics professor David Flynn told Davis rural people are "'forced' to back the candidate of their favorite parties ... because neither delivers enough information for them to make good decisions."

"Neither candidate is laying out any specifics regarding rural-specific policies, even the consequences of other policy ideas such as energy on rural economies," Flynn said. "There is no attention being paid to it. At some level, it is a disservice." Ed Schafer, former agriculture secretary and a member of Romney's Agriculture Advisory Team, said the candidates miss an opportunity to talk about the strength of U.S. farming when they don't focus on rural issues. Obama focuses on renewable energy when talking farm issues, but other parts of the farm-sector "can't get an ear anywhere," Schafer said.

"Rural America is not on the front burner for one main reason: votes," Davis writes. Center for Rural Strategies President Dee Davis said the issues facing rural America are complex and not easy to solve, and candidates know they get most of their votes from urban areas. (Read more)

Rural unemployment drops, but number of jobs doesn't change

The unemployment rate in rural and exurban counties dropped slightly in August, the Daily Yonder reports. It fell to 7.99 percent in rural counties and 7.6 in exurban, which are counties within metropolitan areas, but with half the residents living in rural settings, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The rural rate in July was 8.4 percent, and 8 percent in exurban. Almost nine out of 10 rural counties reported lower unemployment rates this year. (Yonder map shows rural, exurban unemployment change from Aug. 2011 to Aug. 2012; Blue counties had a decrease, orange had an increase.)

"Just because unemployment rates are lower, however, doesn't mean that there's been a boom in rural employment," Yonder Co-Editor Bill Bishop reports. There are slightly fewer people employed in rural counties this August than last August. The number of jobs in rural counties has decreased by almost 3,200 over the past year, according to the BLS. Bishop writes the rural unemployment rate has dropped because the workforce has dropped by almost 230,000 people. The workforce in exurban and urban counties increased during that period.

Four of the 10 rural counties with the largest unemployment increases over the last year were Appalachian coal-producing counties in Kentucky, where coal companies have laid off miners due to power-plant competition from natural gas. West Virginia's Boone County had the greatest unemployment increase. The rest of the top counties with the largest unemployment increases come from Nebraska, Louisiana and Colorado. Almost half the 50 counties with the largest declines in unemployment rates were in Mississippi. (Read more)

In California, there's a fight over rural residents paying a $150 fire-fighting tax

The fires out West are getting hotter, and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association thinks rural residents in California are bearing too much of the burden for fighting them. The group announced Thursday that it is suing to end a $150 annual state fire fee imposed on California's rural residents and want to obtain refunds for those who have already paid the fee.  Kevin Yamamura of the The Sacramento Bee reports that the group brought suit in a Sacramento Superior Court alleging that that the $150 annual fee, which the state began collecting in August, "amounts to a tax that was illegally approved without the necessary two-thirds majority of lawmakers." The tax applies to 825,000 rural homeowners.

Gov. Jerry Brown argues that it is legitimate to ask rural residents to pay higher costs for fire prevention in the wake of larger developments on once-rural lands that face greater wildfire risks. "This is putting a huge stress and strain and fear on rural property owners," Jarvis group President Jon Coupal said. Cal Fire spokeswoman Janet Upton said her organization thinks "it's unfortunate that (the Jarvis group) is trying to obstruct funding that we need for fire prevention. We strongly feel that prevention activities funded by the fee save lives and property." (Read more) 

Feds want 1,000 rural hospitals to switch to electronic health records by 2014

The federal government wants 1,000 "critical access" and rural hospitals to adopt electronic health records by 2014, and is funneling about $30 million through its Regional Extension Center to make it happen. The money could help as many as 1,500 rural hospitals, or 90 percent of those covered by the Small Rural Hospital Improvement Program.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has already secured $32 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money for REC for IT improvement at critical access hospitals, which are classified as facilities with no more than 25 beds and an average of 10 patients a day, Neil Versel of Information Week reports.

The National Rural Health Association is enthusiastic about the funding, but still sees obstacles to implementation, Versel reports. "To realize this goal, we need all hands on deck. We need everyone rowing in sync, including leadership and staff in every critical access and rural hospital, electronic health records vendors, hospital associations and state offices of rural health in every state, Rural Health IT Network Development grantees, Office of the National Coordinator grantees, and many more public and private, federal and local partners," ONC Office of Provider Adoption Support director Mat Kendall, and ONC rural health IT coordinator at Leila Samy said. (Read more)

Access and cultural issues make alcohol, prescription pills rural drugs of choice

"Alcohol and non-heroin opiates are the drugs of choice in rural populations ... while heroin and cocaine top the list in urban areas, according to a new report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration," reports Aaron Levin of Psychiatric News. Methamphetamine usage was about the same in rural and urban areas, "despite the common assumption that meth is largely a rural problem," Levin writes. Rural people also use slightly more marijuana.

Higher use of alcohol and non-heroin opiates, or prescription painkillers, in rural areas may reflect access issues, SAMHSA's Center for Substance Abuse Treatment director H. Wesley Clark said. "Illegal drugs may be harder to conceal in the pipeline to rural areas, or legal substances may be less stigmatized." Rural people steal about 67 percent of the prescription pills they abuse from friends or family. The rest come from doctors, University of New Mexico psychiatry professor Snehal Bhatt told Levin.

About 67 percent of rural users started using before 18, compared to 53 percent of urban users. This probably leads to higher rates of rural youth binge drinking and driving drunk, according to a University of Southern Maine study. "Rural youth, their families and peers are less likely to disapprove of youth drinking than urban youth, risk factors that are associated with greater likelihood of adolescent alcohol use," researcher John Gale wrote in the study. (Read more)

Rural areas have higher percentage of uninsured

The share of rural people under 65 without health insurance increased 8 percent during the recession, and is now higher than in cities or suburbs, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Before 2005, rates of uninsured were about the same in rural and urban areas, but during the recession, the rate of uninsured rural people rose to 18.4 percent, compared to 17.7 percent in urban areas, Bill Bishop of the Daily Yonder reports.

The data show "a huge variation in the percentage of uninsured by state," Bishop writes. In 16 states, at least one in five rural residents under 65 didn't have health insurance. From highest to lowest, they were: Texas, Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Georgia, Idaho, Colorado, Mississippi, Montana, South Carolina, Arkansas, Oregon, Louisiana and North Carolina. The rate of rural people without insurance was higher than in urban areas in all but six states: Illinois, California, Nevada, Connecticut, Florida and New York. (Read more)

Rural residents depend on papers for local news, but urbanites are more interested in local topics

Metropolitan, suburban, smaller town or rural, all types of places are big consumers of news -- be it local, national or international. But how and where we get that news and how much we "participate" in it differs between community types. And that may be more of a function of the digital and social media available to us than our desire to weigh in on the topics. Or so a recent study of local news and community types strongly indicates.

A just-released national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that rural residents did indeed still rely on newspapers for most of their local news. Researchers speculated that is because most rural areas get little coverage from other media, and many "micropolitan" towns of fewer than 50,000 people have no television station.

However, they noted that "the choices about information acquisition are not necessarily the same in all communities. For instance, it might be the case in rural areas that the local newspaper and broadcast outlets are not online or have a very limited online presence and that is a determinant in whether residents get local information online or not."

And, perhaps surprisingly, researchers found that those who live in rural communities are "less interested in almost all local topics than those in other communities. The one exception is taxes. They are also are less likely . . . to say it is easier now to keep up with local information."

Interestingly, rural people were more likely than most to say they are willing to pay for local news content through a paid subscription to a local paper; 37 percent said so, a larger share than any but suburbanites, at 40 percent.

The study, co-authored by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and Internet & American Life Project, in partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, also reported these findings:

• Urban and suburban residents on average use more sources of local news than their small town and rural counterparts and are more likely to consume local news on mobile devices.
• The most active “local news participators” also tend to reside in suburban and urban communities where they email local stories to others, post material on sites, comment, post or e-report.
• Suburbanites are most likely to use radio as a news source -- researchers postulated this might be a consequence of longer commutes. They are the most likely of the four distinct community types to use the Internet for information about local restaurants, businesses and jobs.

To read the full report, go here.

Study: Rural residents have equal access to health care -- if they have insurance and like the drive

A health-care study in Tennessee, which started with the premise that people in rural areas have less access to care than urban dwellers, ended with a rather surprising conclusion: They don't. Not if they have health insurance. "When it comes to commercially insured patients, there’s little disparity in access to health care between residents of rural communities and urban areas in Tennessee," said Dr. Steven L. Counter, president of the BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee Health Institute.

How can this be? The study found that almost half of rural residents pass up the hospitals closest to their homes to go to larger urban hospitals, even if the same services are available locally, writes Getahn Ward of The Tenneseean. "The conclusion we came to is that we’re living in a very mobile society, and the distance is not necessarily a determinant factor in whether people get care or not," said Coulter.

Because the survey did not include consumers, it's only a guess about why they chose to take the time and trouble to go to the big town, but experts says it's a combination of services not being available or a perception that they aren't, even if they are. This raises, again, age-old questions about the viability of rural hospitals, some of which often don’t have the money for capital-intensive technology and services. However, Coulter told the Tennessean that "a recent increase in alliances between rural hospitals and larger hospitals and urban health systems raises hopes that non-urban hospitals may be able to expand their menus of services."

Such partnerships between non-profits and for-profit chains are becoming more common, reports Ward, and some say those efforts will change the perception of those in far-flung regions that great medicine is being practiced close-by. This could be especially important, said Wes Littrell, chief strategy officer and president of Nashville-based Saint Thomas Health, in the new world of health reform. “We expect that when you get more into population management that you need to take care of the patient closer to home in the lower-cost setting,” he said. (Read more)

Dish Network to offer broadband-Internet services to 14.5 million rural folks

Rural customers are getting more broadband choices, but they're still not cheap. Dish Network Corp., the second- largest U.S. satellite-television provider, has introduced a nationwide broadband-Internet service called DishNet that’s aimed at rural customers. According to Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Alex Sherman, Dish is targeting the 14.5 million rural Americans who have slower Internet access or no online connection at all.

While the Internet speed it plans to offer these customers -- 10 megabits per second -- is a fraction of what’s offered by cable and fiber-optic lines in urban areas, "it’s fast enough for most applications, such as social networking, video streaming and Internet-based phone calls," Dish representatives told Sherman. The cost of the service should be between $40 and $50 a month. (Read more) 

Lesser-educated white people, especially women, are living shorter lives, study finds

The life expectancy of white people without a high school diploma fell from 1990 to 2008, with women losing the most, an average of five years, according to a new University of Illinois at Chicago study. These demographics (older and less educated) are disproportionately rural.

The average life expectancy for white women without a high-school diploma was 73.5 years, compared to 83.9 for those with a four-year college degree or more. White men who did not fionish high school are living an average of 67.5 years, compared to 80.4 for those with a four-year degree or more.

"The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription-drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less-educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least-educated Americans who lack health insurance," reports Sabrina Tavernise of The New York Times.

"Some cautioned that the results could be overstated because Americans without a high school diploma — about 12 percent of the population, down from about 22 percent in 1990, according to the Census Bureau — were a shrinking group that was now more likely to be disadvantaged in ways besides education, compared with past generations," Tavernise reports.

The study was published last month in the journal Health Affairs, and the National Academy of Sciences is investigating the decline to better determine its cause. (Read more)

Rural people in swing states agree with Democrats on immigration -- if they don't see the party label

A National Rural Assembly poll shows that rural people in nine swing states in the presidential election have complex views of immigration, and they are often skewed by party lines. If the party affiliation is hidden, rural voters agree more with the Democratic Party's immigration position than with the Republican Party's. When the affiliation is revealed, a majority of rural voters in the nine states agree with the Republican Party's position. Partisan labels influence how people feel about immigration positions by more than 10 percentage points. (Daily Yonder graph)

"Immigration isn't being talked about much in this campaign, and you can see why in the poll," reports Bill Bishop of the Daily Yonder. "The issue is much too slippery. Rural Americans, who are largely Republican, don’t think this is a huge problem and they have very mixed opinions about immigration." Rural voters in this poll believe Mitt Romney better represents their views on illegal immigration, besting President Obama 49 percent to 31. But, 60 percent of those polled said illegal immigration was a small problem in their community. (Read more)

Drought slows rural economy in 10 central states

The economy in rural areas of 10 Midwestern and Western states continued to look weak this month as the region begins a slow recovery from this summer's oppressive drought, according to The Rural Mainstreet Index, an economic survey of rural bankers by Creighton University in Omaha. The economic index for this month is 48.3, up slightly from August, but still in negative-growth territory. The index ranges from 0 to 100, with 50 being growth-neutral.

"The drought continues to dampen economic activity for businesses linked to agriculture such as ethanol, and agriculture-equipment seller," Creighton economist Ernie Goss told the Nebraska City News Press. "I expect food processors to take a hit later in the year as higher food prices work their way through the system." The index examines rural economies in Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, the Dakotas and Wyoming. (Read more)