News from rural America.

Dolly Parton’s legacy lives on through books, Texas health workers want relief from cuts to Medicaid and CHIP while Virginia health advocates urge lawmakers to restore Medicaid and ACA tax credits and finding a lawyer in rural Alabama just got easier.

TRANSCRIPT

For the Daily Yonder and Public News Service, this is the news from rural America.

Medicaid and CHIP are crucial to health care for Texas moms and kids, but last year's Republican budget bill started the process of nearly $20 billion in cuts to maternal and pediatric care.

Christina Hopp with the Children's Hospital Association of Texas says it changes funding formulas for providers who care for half of the state's kids and many of their mothers.

Nationwide, about 50% of the kids are covered by Medicaid or CHIP, and that stays true for children in Texas.

Nearly 3 million of the state's children are covered by Medicaid, as are a quarter million pregnant Texas women.

Hopp's financially fragile rural hospitals are already closing or eliminating services like maternity care.

We kind of have to ask, don't make the cut as deep for children's hospitals and give us a longer period of time, so there's a more gradual reduction.

And in Virginia, cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act are prompting health care advocates to use the midterm election as leverage for Republicans to reverse cuts.

Christina Rivera, with the nonprofit Called to Justice, says lawmakers, not regular Americans, should be losing sleep over policies that put 100,000 Virginians at risk and could close three dozen rural hospitals.

Their votes should keep them up at night.

Every day that goes by is their missed opportunity to reverse these cuts and bring back the tax credits.

Finding legal help can be tough in Alabama.

Nearly two-thirds of its counties are legal deserts, averaging one lawyer for every thousand residents.

But a new nonprofit has so far recruited a dozen attorneys to underserved communities.

Harvesters of Hope Executive Director Tom Heflin uses the example of a small town with only one divorce lawyer, who can only represent one side.

The other, to be represented, probably has to hire someone from somewhere farther away, which they will have to pay for that travel time.

Growing up in rural Tennessee, Dolly Parton's father wasn't literate, and she rarely saw books in friends' homes.

Determined to make a difference in today's children's lives, she created her Imagination Library to distribute 300 million free books to kids worldwide.

James Pond is with Tennessee's Early Literacy Foundation.

At the end of that five years, every child who participates in this program has a home library of 60 books.

Since her death last month, contributions to the program have been nonstop.

Launched 30 years ago in Tennessee, it soon expanded across the country.

That includes World Bayor New Mexico, where Nancy Stevens directs the public library.

This is a way of putting books into kids' hands where the parents don't have to research what book to buy.

They don't have to pay for them.

They just have to open their mailbox.

For the Daily Yonder and Public News Service, I'm Roz Brown.

For more rural stories, visit dailyyonder.com.