Medical billing systems drive up the cost of commercial health insurance. One way to ease that strain is to get more low-income people on Medicaid. Hospitals have to collect as much as it costs them to take care of their patients. That is hard for small hospitals, most of which are rural. [node:read-more:link]

Vermont is offering $10,000 to workers who move with their remote job to the state. It’s part of larger efforts in Northern New England to attract more young people.  When measured by median age, the three Northern New England states (Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine) are the three oldest in the country. [node:read-more:link]

Timber management on federal lands can be justified for valid reasons — protecting watersheds, conserving wildlife habitat, promoting overall forest health —  but it rarely helps communities confront looming wildfire disasters. The best solutions: better land use planning and improved building designs. The President issued an executive order last month that instructs federal land managers to treat 8.45 million acres of land and cut 4.4 billion board feet of timber. [node:read-more:link]

Will Arkansas become the first state to rescind its ban on local-government ownership of internet service providers? With the issue before the state Legislature, citizen input could have an impact on the decision. The real legislation, SB 150, unanimously passed out state Senate committee on February 7. But then the full state Senate hijacked the bill and put compromising restrictions in the wording. [node:read-more:link]

More than a decade ago, a group of people from Independence, Oregon, asked legacy telecommunications corporations to bring high-speed fiber internet connectivity to their rural community. “They told us ‘we’ll get to you in 10 or 20 years,’” said Shawn Irvine, economic development director for the City of Independence.   “So we got together and decided to just do it ourselves,” Irvine said. [node:read-more:link]

More Americans than ever say they want sustainable food. According to a 2018 survey conducted by the International Food Information Council, 59% of American consumers said they care about whether their food is grown sustainably. But much like “GMO” or “natural,” sustainability can be a murky term with no clear definition. Now, two stalwarts of the ‘Big Food’ landscape are working to clear up that murkiness with a “Turbo-Tax style” software platform aimed at getting farmers to grow their crops more sustainably. [node:read-more:link]

The Oklahoma Board of Agriculture on Tuesday approved proposals for new or expanding poultry operations requiring them to be a certain distance away from homes and schools, but some eastern Oklahoma residents say the plan doesn't go far enough. The board voted 3-2 for the rules that include "setback" requirements that operations with fewer than 150,000 birds be at least 500 feet from homes and larger operations be at least 1,000 feet away. [node:read-more:link]

In a recent blog post, Why don’t we vote like we shop, Jayson Lusk discussed his consumer research into the puzzle of why California voters have voted to outlaw the same cage-produced eggs they overwhelming select when purchasing groceries.Explaining the vote-buy gap may be simple. When we pay for items ourselves, whether in a store or restaurant, we know the price and we know that the money is coming out of our own wallets. When deciding at the polls, I think voters don’t know the cost and most think the money is coming out of someone else’s wallet. [node:read-more:link]

Researchers describe two late Neanderthals with exceptionally high nitrogen isotope ratios, which would traditionally be interpreted as the signature of freshwater fish consumption. By studying the isotope ratios of single amino acids, they however demonstrated that instead of fish, the adult Neanderthal had a diet relying on large herbivore mammals and that the other Neanderthal was a breastfeeding baby whose mother was also a carnivore. [node:read-more:link]

Near Honolulu, researchers are testing how to generate electricity from the energy in ocean waves. And Hawaii’s largest electric utility is among the first to widely use advanced “smart” inverters to help manage the flow of electricity from rooftop solar panels into the power grid. [node:read-more:link]