By Sarah Jane Tribble and Holly K. Hacker, KFF Health News
BOLIGEE, Ala. — Green lights flickered on the wireless router in Barbara Williams’ kitchen. Just one bar lit up — a weak signal connecting her to the world beyond her home in the Alabama Black Belt.
Next to the router sat medications, vitamin D pills, and Williams’ blood glucose monitor kit.
“I haven’t used that thing in a month or so,” said Williams, 72, waving toward the kit. Diagnosed with diabetes more than six years ago, she has developed nerve pain from neuropathy in both legs.
Williams is one of nearly 3 million Americans who live in mostly rural counties that lack both health care and reliable high-speed internet, according to an analysis by KFF Health News, which showed that these people tend to live sicker and die younger than others in America.
Compared with those in other regions, patients across the rural South, Appalachia, and remote West are most often unable to make a video call to their doctor or log into their patient portals. Both are essential ways to participate in the U.S. medical system. And Williams is among those who can do neither.
This year, more than $42 billion allocated in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is expected to begin flowing to states as part of a national “Internet for All” initiative launched by the Biden administration. But the program faces uncertainty after Commerce Department Secretary Howard Lutnick last week announced a “rigorous review” asserting that the previous administration’s approach was full of “woke mandates.”
High rates of chronic illness and historical inequities are hallmarks of many of the more than 200 U.S. counties with poor services that KFF Health News identified. Dozens of doctors, academics, and advocates interviewed for this article unanimously agreed that limited internet service hinders medical care and access.
Without fast, reliable broadband, “all we’re going to do is widen health care…
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