Author: Wisconsin Watch

Rural residents are more prone to chronic pain and opioid addiction, but their health care systems offer fewer alternatives and treatments. In the village of Necedah, population 916, one doctor set out to change that. Dr. Angela Gatzke-Plamann didn’t grasp the full extent of her community’s opioid crisis until one desperate patient called on a Friday afternoon in 2016. “He was in complete crisis because he was admitting to me that he had lost control of his use of opioids,” recalls Gatzke-Plamann, 40, the only full-time family physician in the central Wisconsin village of Necedah, population 916, nestled among...

A retired obstetrician says Catholic restrictions kept her from providing the best care to patients: ‘When you have a moral conflict like that, it eats away at you.’ When Ascension’s St. Joseph Hospital in Milwaukee announced it would cut back services in 2018, residents of the surrounding Sherman Park area balked. The predominantly black, low-income neighborhood already faced its share of challenges. Nearly a third of residents in the ZIP code live in poverty, and black infants born there are more than twice as likely to die as white infants. Residents feared that reducing services would exacerbate these disparities,...

Climate change is bringing heavier rains, making it tougher to keep untreated sewage and stormwater out of the Great Lakes. Thirty-year-old Conner Andrews has swum in Lake Michigan since his childhood days vacationing in Door County. “It was always a huge deal for me to go to the beach and have fun there and enjoy the waves and just being immersed in such a vast, vast body of water,” said Andrews, a Nashotah resident and former member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison men’s swim team. These days he gets the same feeling swimming at Milwaukee-area beaches. But he must...

In the past year, some dioceses and religious orders have for the first time listed their accused clergy. At others, the decades of silence continues. When she was 7, Patty Gallagher was chosen to bring the priest who served her parish and school in Monona, Wisconsin, his daily milk. The Rev. Lawrence Trainor was practically a member of the family. He came over for dinner and visited the family cottage. Gallagher’s father and Trainor played cards and drank together. Trainor, a priest at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, ingratiated himself with her parents. And then, Gallagher said, he “raped...

Proposals could help those with past arrests or convictions seek jobs and other opportunities; experts say the existing expungement law is hard to navigate. When Madison barber and business owner Brian Britt, 42, stepped up to a folding table in the entryway of the Urban League of Greater Madison, he had a single goal in his mind: Wipe from his record the decades-old criminal convictions he says are holding him back. In 2000, at age 22, Britt was convicted of marijuana possession with intent to deliver as a repeat offense and a gun charge — recklessly endangering safety with...

If Wisconsin legalizes medical or recreational marijuana, state regulations would drive whether small and minority-owned businesses thrive, or even survive. The historic hub of black culture on the south side of Chicago called Bronzeville bears the marks of disinvestment, white flight and redlining common to many of the city’s black-majority neighborhoods. Along the expansive South Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, lines of greystones alternate in and out of disrepair, and many of the district’s blocks that were once home to vibrant institutions — earning it the name “Black Metropolis” — are now mottled with overgrown, vacant lots. A...