Grew up in the country and the hospital was...limited. Go-getter doctors can make better money in the cities and medicine has become a for-profit enterprise. Still have to go 40 miles for some specialties (at least my Mom did, one reason she moved to the city). Not everyone can do that

busting at the seams because they've closed so many of the county and rural hospitals.

My sister (now deceased) lived in a rural town. There's a hospital there, but it can only do so much. This past January, she got covid (not an antivaxxer, but had been living in a nursing home). She was admitted to the local hospital, but when a nephrolology consult was needed, they had to put her in an ambulance and send her to a bigger hospital in a city that was 50 miles away. In her case, Medicaid paid for everything, but without that, she would have have been up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

(Before anyone asks, she was diabetic and her kidneys had been gradually failing. That bout of covid pushed her over the edge into what is called end-stage kidney failure, treatable only by dialysis or by a transplant. She wasn't a good candidate for either, for reasons that would take too long to go into here. She was past being able to make any decisions, so as the person who held her medical power of attorney, I had to make the call to change her code status to dnr (do not resuscitate) and call in hospice services. She was transported 50 miles back to the nursing home in her little town, where she died about a week later. The hospice folks were fantastic, and I am fine now.)

I mention this just as an example of the extra hassles that can occur in a small rural town with a lack of local access to specialized medical care, even when payment is not a barrier.

Black lung disease from coal mining.

Driving 18-wheel rigs with 4 hours of sleep.

Alcoholism and cigarettes from job stress and financial stress.

Local hospitals bought and shut down.

Supermarkets that push more snacks than vegetables and fruit.

So many good research projects, dissertations, theses in these numbers. Come on , people!

A lot of America's furniture is made here, within a 75 mile radius of my house. It's really difficult physical labor, and people end up wore out and old before their time. Upholsterers by about age 50 have knarled hands with swollen joints, same with any of the spring up and frame assembly people. Finishing work on the exposed woods has the problem of lung and breathing issues due to the stains, paints, and the inevitable sanding. Sewers aren't left out either, the repetitive motion of sewing is terrible for the hands and arms, as well as the pulling and tugging needed to feed heavy upholstery fabrics through the machines.
We have other manufacturing here too ( most all the duct tape sold during the COVID craze was manufactured not 20 miles from my house), and all of the industries have their own issues, but the bottom line is that a lot of the work, probably most, is factory and physical. It can be decent money - if you're good at your job - but it requires hard work on production pay...meaning you get paid per piece. Much of the rural south lives in those kind of jobs.
Then add to that the fact of being 20 miles or more from a hospital in an area where it might take an ambulance 15 minutes to get to your house, and take them another 25 to get you to the hospital and you end up with what we've got now.

We have a living room set from NC and one of my kids had a bicycle from the remnants of the Schwinn company

And that is what is necessary to make the furniture look good.. You don't get a tight back on your chair without an upholsterer physically pulling the fabric into place and then stapling it to the frame for instance. It's just what it takes to make a nice, well built piece of furniture. It's not that it's slave labor without safety regulations, but it's just as physical as working as a farmer, which is pretty much what many of these folks grandparents were.

I remember many shops that rebuilt or reupholstered furniture, even on remote roadsides. Are those still a thing?
We have a few items that I'd like to have fixed for my wife. I'm also counting on finally being able to get some canvas work done for the boat.
But I definitely won't grumble about costs now.

Freshwater fish have up to 300 times the concentration of PFASs than is currently considered “safe”. I don’t know about other game animals but I would think they are contaminated also.
I read somewhere a few years back that the meat source with the fastest growth in sales was raccoon meat because a whole animal was only $5.

Their frenzied hatred for anything that might possibly contribute to the greater good created anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. Dying in order to make an idiotic ideological point is attention-getting, to be sure, but if one is not around to savor the attention, it's a little harebrained.

"Nobody's gonna tell me what to do! I have the freedom to smoke and blow it libs faces!"

"I ain't gonna eat that arugula and rabbit food! Vegetables and salads are for f*****s and soy boys! Gimme a big slab of red meat and a heap of fried potatoes!"

"I can drive my ATV over boulders and up steep slopes at top speeds and not wear a helmet! I ain't gonna be a lib pussy and worry about flipping!"

And so on...

Toxic masculinity kills.

What a prosecutor might call depraved indifference.

It's not really a factor of rural/urban......

Oh, wait. Men generally can't drive on mountains in downtown environments. But they still cause most of the vehicular deaths and injuries while downtown.

...during her 2013 speech at CPAC? She was ridiculing the health initiatives of Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Obama.

[edit: it turns out I got some details wrong...Palin was drinking from a Super Big Gulp.]

https://archive.thinkprogress.org/sarah-palin-drinks-big-gulp-during-cpac-speech-shoot-its-just-pop-5ae8c4d8a0f7/

Mayor Bloomberg went quickly in reverse on banning big gulps.

They tend to walk more and seek out activities that keep them moving. In rural areas people drive everywhere, including down the driveway to the mailbox.

Hard to find parking around planet.fitness, 24 hr fitness, golds gym and others after work

Reprehensible, and juet plain mean-spirited.

I believe a few red states have hopped on board belatedly. Any state still refusing to do so is the definition of a sh!thole state, afaic.

We urbanites:

-Make better choices

-We don't abuse ourselves with drink and drugs

-We are better connected to our communities

-We don't rely on the government for health insurance

-etc. etc.

You get the idea. Hard to blame yourself when you're so used to blaming others for your problems.

Living out in the sticks has a significant disadvantage when dealing with life and death matters that require immediate attention.

People in the city would probably consider us rural, but:
We are 20 minutes by ambulance from a Level II trauma center, same time to a Level III, and in a different direction, another Level III & a Level IV.
Obviously, there's a plethora of doctors, specialists, & other Healthcare options.
Drive 45 miles south or west & you'd hit Healthcare wasteland. Go another 100 and the people there are way underserved.
I think this conversation is onto something.

Add the time waiting for the ambulance to arrive to that .

People who need serious care are usually flown out to Wausau WI or Duluth MN

They won't have to worry about who's caring for them...

Heartless... Likely. Accurate... Definitely.

Healthcare not as available, people walk more and go to gym more in the city. Probably because of the lack of exercise, more overweight, I wonder if more pollution from chemicals in fields.

Not as much to do and I read as a senior you live longer if you keep more active and are more social.

my southern mom cooked it when we were kids... salty, crunchy goodness.

other than the rare fish n chips shops, i never see fried fish on menus in my area.

I do cook my eggs in olive oil and use avacado oil but they are healthy fats.

They are completely irrational

Could it bee the vast amounts of these products sprayed on surrounding crops? It's in the air!

It sucks to be poor would cover most all reasons.

Add to that drug addiction - and you have a recipe for disaster.

Indigenous Americans aside and African Americans in Southern states (Voter suppression and racism) . . .

These people voted for these bowls full of shit.

As long as Indigenous and Black folks are getting screwed over - they don't care.

I've said it before at DU and I haven't said it for a few years:

We could have medicare for all as long as its treated like The Raw (New) Deal - for white Americans only.

In Michigan, 3% of the population lives in the northern 1/3 of the state while about 80% lives in the lowest 1/3 of the state.

While the rural north may have a higher mortality rate, a few extra deaths per year spread out over 15 counties probably isn't even noticable.

I also live 3 miles from a small town that used to be a full blown hospital capable of handling any emergency that most people needed. Its still got 75 beds and it served the rural area within a 40 mile radius of it. I was born there. I had a massive heart attack in October 2022. I drove myself to that hospital. They could do nothing but give me an IV and some drugs, slap an ECG on me to monitor and wait for an ambulance. Oh, and try and jump start me if I died. Weather was too bad for a chopper. City has 2 750k dollar ambulances but they can't go out of town. They held a phone to my ear while I was screaming in pain so a heart surgeon 30 miles away could explain the risk of having a chemical thrombolysis procedure. He basically told me without knowing how soon they could get me to him (at the same medical system as the local hospital) and seeing my ECG I may die without it. That was 90 min after I had gotten there. I had to sign a freakin' release form. Yeah, it probably saved my life but also significantly increased the possibility of a stroke for the next 90 days or so. I finally got to that specific hospital (in their ambulance). I went straight from the ambulance to my ass hitting the Cath Lab table and the last words I heard were "his ECG is looking really bad" before they knocked me out. I came close to losing consciousness but was afraid I'd die, so I just screamed in pain the whole time to stay awake. That was FOUR HOURS after I got to the hospital in that small town.

I lost 30% of my heart muscle that morning because IMO, it took them too long to get me to a capable facility. I did a little research, there are 10 Cath Labs within 35 miles. There are over 100 ambulances both fire rescue and private (hospitals, private companies) within 35 miles. But theres only 1 hospital with a couple Cath Lab's and 6 Ambulances within 35 miles directly associated with this hospital system. 4 hours is not acceptable with that much availability within a 30 min ambulance ride.

Yeah, don't get sick in a cornfield.

I live in California and there are dozens of ethnic restaurants and food markets within two miles of my house. The supermarket nearest our home stocks a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables. Maybe forty percent of my neighbors are immigrants and the children of immigrants, from all over the world, so the supermarkets sell foods that are familiar to them. Even our WalMart has a decent produce selection.

I do most of the cooking in our house and spend a lot of time in the kitchen at family gatherings. When I'm visiting rural U.S.A. I hardly know what to cook, the ingredients for half my "go to" recopies are simply unavailable. My wife is a vegetarian-approaching-vegan and servers in rural restaurants and cafes will sometimes look at her like she's an alien.

I think a lot of people in rural U.S.A. are simply malnourished. Certain urban areas are also "food deserts."