Week of Aug. 21, 2025

From the editor’s desk

As the list of rollbacks to America’s social safety net grows longer, a few opinion pieces on the topic have caught my eye recently. Their authors are all personally advocating for people they know who have been—or are likely to be—harmed by health-care cuts.

Rob Banghart, who works with Crossroads of Southern Nevada, an addiction treatment center in Las Vegas, was caught in what he calls “a relentless tide of addiction” for decades. Fifteen times, he overdosed and was saved by Narcan. He got sober and began volunteering to help others struggling with addiction. Energized, in part, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appearing to prioritize addiction recovery, Banghart voted for Trump, believing “we had found an advocate at a level we had never known.”

In his Aug. 15 opinion piece in the Nevada Independent, “My biggest mistake in sobriety was voting for Trump in 2024,” he said that when the government proposed slashing a “shocking $56 million” from Narcan funding, his feeling of hope turned to one of betrayal. He wrote:

For states such as Nevada, which are already struggling with rising overdose rates, such cuts are not just detrimental, they are catastrophic. They undermine the very infrastructure of recovery and prevention that we have painstakingly built.

Rachel Roth Aldhizer, from North Carolina, the mother of a disabled 4-year-old who relies on Medicaid, is bracing for her state to make voluntary cuts to the program, even before federal cuts take full effect. In her moving op-ed, “I’m a Conservative. My Disabled Son Needs Medicaid to Live,” published today in The New York Times, she details her own family’s difficulties and concludes that, as a society, we are obligated to take care of each other:

How we care for our most vulnerable reveals what we believe about ourselves. I’m just one mother, and David is just one child. But this affects your neighbors. This affects you. At one point or another most of us will lose our independence, health, rationality and will. Eventually we will rely wholly on someone else to care for us. Dependence, weakness, need of others: These are features, not bugs, of the human experience.

Here in Reno, Jessica Fry authored an RN&R guest editorial, “My friend died trying to navigate weak public assistance programs. Now, they’re being cut further,” which we published at RenoNR.com today.

She describes what it was like to live with a friend who had severe epilepsy and tried hard to support himself; he scraped by on Supplemental Security Income and food assistance. She wrote: 

Our goal was to help him reach an independent life where he didn’t have to rely on anyone else for support. He wanted to work, but finding an employer who would accommodate his epilepsy was nearly impossible.

Now, Fry, with intel from public Nevada Medicaid meetings, anticipates cuts to that program in 2026. 

If you have a few extra minutes today, all of these opinion pieces are worth reading in their entirety.

Take care,

—Kris Vagner, managing editor