In 2024 the United States recorded 649 maternal deaths, a rate of 17.9 per 100,000 live births, against 669 deaths and 18.6 in 2023. Inside that national figure the rate for Black non-Hispanic women was 44.8 — set against 14.2 for White non-Hispanic women, 18.1 for Asian non-His…
Federal Medicaid law requires every state to cover comprehensive dental care for enrollees under 21, and requires nothing at all for adults. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services classifies the adult dental benefit as optional, which means a state may limit the type and…
On 2026-05-05 the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its count of American Indian and Alaska Native people reported missing during calendar year 2025. The figure was 9,687, down from 10,248 in 2024, and the release added that 256 of the 9,687 were still missing as of 2026-…
The National Flood Insurance Program pays claims on the same buildings over and over. As of January 2026 there were 112,640 repetitive-loss properties insured by the NFIP, about 2.5 percent of the 4.58 million policies in force in December 2025 — and as of December 2021, 48 perc…
Opioid manufacturers, distributors and retailers have agreed to settlements that will total 58.58 billion dollars once a pending 774 million dollar settlement is finalized, a figure recorded as of 2026-04-14. State and local governments are set to receive more than 50 billion do…
In 2024 the United States recovered organs from 16,989 deceased donors and performed 46,750 solid organ transplants. In the same year 11,244 organs were recovered for transplant and then not transplanted — an 11.5 percent rise from 10,085 in 2023, and 20.7 percent of all organs …
The Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission counted 141,959 documented orphaned oil and gas wells on state and private land in a 2023 survey, up 54 percent from 92,203 in 2020, and estimated a further 250,000 to 740,000 undocumented wells whose locations are not known. The Bur…
Medicare Advantage insurers made 52.8 million prior authorization determinations in 2024, against 49.8 million requests in 2023. Insurers denied 4.1 million of them in full or in part — 7.7 percent, a larger share than the 6.4 percent denied in 2023.
In February 2026 the Oregon Supreme Court put a clock on criminal cases in which the state cannot find a defense lawyer — 60 days after arraignment for a misdemeanor, 90 days for a felony. 1,465 cases were dismissed under that ruling, 915 of them in Multnomah County and 263 in W…
The United States has 899,047 public housing units. In October 2025 the Public and Affordable Housing Research Corporation published the first national estimate since 2010 of what it would cost to preserve them: USD 169.1 billion, or USD 188,090 per unit in 2025 dollars. About 2…
FRA Safety Advisory 2023-01, published 2023-03-03, records that on 3 February 2023 a freight train rolled past three trackside heat detectors in Ohio. The failing bearing read 38 degrees F above ambient at the first, 103 about ten miles later, and 253 about twenty miles after th…
An ambulance desert is a place more than 25 minutes from where an ambulance is stationed. In the last national count, which covered 41 states using 2021-2022 data and was published in May 2023, 4.5 million people lived in one, and 2.3 million of them lived in rural counties — a …
45 percent of United States counties are classified as pharmacy deserts, and 48.4 million Americans — about 1 in 7 — live in one. That is up from 41.2 million in 2021, an increase of 7.2 million people in four years. The shortage bites hardest where the population is thinnest, a…
The United States has no permanent repository and no operating consolidated storage site for commercial used nuclear fuel. About 95,000 metric tons of it, held in some 330,000 fuel assemblies, sat at 73 sites at the end of 2024, and the pile grows by roughly 2,000 metric tons a …
Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act lets an employer hold a certificate that authorizes paying a worker with a disability less than the federal minimum wage. As of May 1, 2024, Department of Labor data showed 801 employers with either an issued certificate or a pending…
Across tribal communities in northeastern Arizona, one in three homes does not have running water. More than 10,000 homes on Southwestern Indian reservations lack it entirely, in a region where the tribes hold substantial water rights on paper. The channel that actually lays hou…
The United States has no national count of how many sexual assault kits sit untested. A systematic attempt to build one, through public records requests to all 50 states, documented at least 25,000 untested kits for 2022 and obtained usable data from only 30 states and the Distr…
On 2026-08-03 the Department of Veterans Affairs reported 611,453 disability compensation and pension rating claims pending. Of those, 70,529 had been waiting more than 125 days since receipt — the threshold the agency itself uses to define the backlog. That backlog number dropp…
Workers in the United States lose wages they have already earned, and the federal body that is supposed to get those wages back is smaller than at any point in the past half century. The Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor had 611 investigators as of 14 May 2025 — …
Combustible vegetation accumulates on federal land faster than the agencies remove it, and the gap has a published size. For FY2022 the Forest Service reported about 63 million acres of National Forest System land at high or very high wildfire hazard potential, and reported haza…