Economic Impacts

What Happens to Health Programs if the Federal Government Shuts Down? - KFF Health News Medicare and Medicaid shouldn’t be affected, but confusion can be expected. Lynne Shallcross KFF Health News

For the first time since 2019, congressional gridlock is poised to at least temporarily shut down big parts of the federal government — including many health programs.

US sets record for billion-dollar weather disasters in a year — and there's still 4 months to go The deadly firestorm in Hawaii and Hurricane Idalia’s watery storm surge helped push the United States to an annual record for the number of weather disasters that cost at least $1 billion. AP News

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The planet has broiled this summer, with July winning the unwelcome title of the hottest month since records began, in the nineteenth century. Indeed, climate scientists think that it was possibly the hottest month in the past 120,000 years. Given the rapid pace of climate change, however, July offered merely a taste of the heat to come. In 2015, world leaders established a goal to keep average global surface temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures in order to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. In July, global temperatures breached that critical ceiling, if only briefly. Nearly 5,000 local heat and rainfall records were broken in the United States alone; globally, the number exceeded 10,000. And scientists anticipate that 2023 will clock in as the hottest year on record.