Editor’s note: This story has been edited to remove a link to an anti-Semitic website and its quoted content. This change was made after receiving feedback from a member of Wausau’s Jewish community. Comments and suggestions are always welcome at editor@wausaupilotandreview.com. By Shereen Siewert | Wausau Pilot & Review Residents in Wausau say they received […]

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Wausau Pilot & Review Nine candidates have submitted their candidacy papers to run for the office of Village Board trustee, the highest number of trustee candidates that the village has ever received. A spring primary will be held Feb. 20 to narrow the field. “We anticipate an exciting year for elections,” said Kronenwetter Village Clerk […]

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Over the past few months, a group called Concerned Citizens of Iron River, a mostly anonymous group on Facebook, have started calling for books to be removed from my local library, the Evelyn Goldberg Briggs Memorial Library in Iron River, Wisconsin (population 1,100). Most of these books being challenged are about LGBTQ+, and specifically trans, […]

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When Jenny Van Sickle was elected to the Superior, Wisconsin, City Council in 2017, she joked that the first two calls she got were from her mother and representatives of the Nemadji Trail Energy Center, a proposed 625-megawatt combined-cycle gas-fired power plant planned for a site on the Nemadji River adjacent to her neighborhood, East End.

A social worker by training, she sought office to fight for things like mental health resources and accessible childcare. The nuances of a massive power plant proposal were beyond her expertise, and like other civic leaders, she was open to promises that it would provide jobs, a bridge to clean energy and grid reliability.

Heavy industry was nothing new in the port town; an Enbridge Energy oil terminal is also located in the neighborhood. In 2019, the council unanimously passed a resolution supporting the project.

But the more Van Sickle learned, the more she had doubts about the plant. She began asking more questions and felt like she was getting “misinformation and disinformation” from its developers — Dairyland Power Cooperative and Minnesota Power.

She was especially concerned to learn that the proposal included the possibility of burning heavily polluting diesel if natural gas wasn’t available.

“When you finally build up the courage to talk about it, it’s like a dam breaking,” she recounted, and other residents also began to share their fears.

Changing landscape

Now, Van Sickle devotes much of her life to opposing the $700 million power plant, which received crucial approval from the state Public Service Commission in January 2020 and is scheduled to go online by 2027 — if it receives permits still needed from agencies including the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Construction could reportedly start next year.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club and Clean Wisconsin are demanding the Public Service Commission reconsider and reopen the process around the crucial certificate of public convenience and necessity that was issued in January 2020.

That’s because two major factors have changed since the commission granted the certificate.

Wisconsin utilities have launched plans to install 480 MW of battery storage by 2025. That’s enough storage to work in tandem with renewables to provide reliable power, advocates argue.

And the Inflation Reduction Act offers direct-pay incentives for renewables, replacing tax credits and making renewable development much more financially viable for nonprofit entities, including rural electric cooperatives like Dairyland, that don’t pay taxes.

Clean Wisconsin and Sierra Club filed a lawsuit challenging the Public Service Commission’s certificate. A district court backed the commission, and they are now awaiting an appellate court decision.

Clean Wisconsin staff attorney Brett Korte noted that the Public Service Commission has the authority to reopen a case when it chooses.

One of the three public service commissioners, Rebecca Valcq, argued against granting the certificate. Her dissent cited environmental impacts including erosion and the effect on wetlands, and she questioned the availability of water — to be drawn from an aquifer — to cool the plant. She also stated the plant was not needed for a reliable electric supply.

Advocates are hopeful the commission would decide differently if the case is reopened.

“It’s just a shame it got approved when it did, before a lot of other opportunities were there,” Korte said. “Ultimately it’s still an opportunity for Dairyland to make a different decision. They haven’t started construction; they could still make the right call here. There are all kinds of advocates and partners who would love to talk to them about other opportunities.”

Federal funding 

Dairyland describes the Nemadji Trail Energy Center, or NTEC, as key to its investment in renewables, to provide power when they aren’t available.

Dairyland spokesperson Katie Thomson said Dairyland has submitted a letter of intent to apply for funding for 1,700 megawatts of wind and solar from the New ERA (Empowering Rural America) program created by the Inflation Reduction Act, which makes $9.7 billion available for rural electric cooperatives to transition to clean energy, administered by the USDA.

Dairyland spokesperson Deb Mirasola said that the Nemadji plant would not be included in that application, but “as we have noted all along NTEC is critical to supporting the new renewable additions. The Nemadji Trail Energy Center is key to the clean energy transition, as a reliable, low-emissions natural gas power plant which will ramp up and down quickly to support renewable energy.”

Thomson said Dairyland will likely apply for funding for the Nemadji plant through the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service program.

Korte said seeking federal funding for natural gas is “ironic and sad especially now with the new federal funding for renewables. We don’t think it’s a good investment at all. They would be better off investing in renewable energy including battery storage if they feel like they need that kind of peaking capacity.”

Indigenous and community issues

Van Sickle was the first person of color and Indigenous person elected to the Superior City Council. She is an Alaskan Native of Tlingit and Athabaskan descent. Meanwhile Superior sits amid ceded Indigenous lands on the edge of Lake Superior, which Ojibwe refer to as Gitchi-Gami.

The gas plant would pose a threat to the natural ecology that tribal members hold sacred, including the St. Louis estuary, critics say. Advocates are demanding a more stringent environmental impact study than the developers have already submitted, as part of the process to secure federal funding. Almost 10,000 letters have been sent to the USDA asking the federal agency to deny loans for the gas plant in order to protect Gitchi-Gami.

Additionally, the plant would be very near a cemetery where almost 200 Ojibwe ancestors were buried, after they were disinterred from a traditional burial ground in 1918 for U.S. Steel to build ore docks, which were never actually constructed.

The Nemadji application to the Public Service Commission acknowledges that it is within half a mile of three residential neighborhoods. Van Sickle described it as an environmental justice issue, with residents put at risk from the pollution and any accidents. Many residents still remember having to evacuate during a nearby refinery fire in 2018, and a benzene spill in 1992, at other local industrial facilities.

“I know what it’s like for my neighbors to live amongst these giants,” she said.

Van Sickle, who is known as an ally of labor unions, said the 350 jobs promised at the plant do not compensate for all the risks and concerns.

“In the last few years we have worked so hard to invest in East End,” she said, including by raising money to revamp Carl Gullo Park named for a local World War II veteran and educator. “If a local official is not going to protect their most sacred spaces, who will? Sometimes progress is saying no.”

Bigger picture 

Along with the gas plant, the proposal calls for a new 345-kilovolt transmission line, relocation of an existing gas pipeline, and construction of a new gas pipeline to tap an existing gas supply network.

Van Sickle and other opponents argue that not only is the gas plant problematic in its own right, but it will also drive more investment in gas infrastructure and fracking, which has already had devastating environmental consequences for the larger Great Lakes region.

Dairyland says the plant could be retrofitted to run on up to 30% hydrogen, which is being promoted as an industrial energy source by the Department of Energy including with the establishment of hydrogen hubs nationwide.

The plant would be a merchant generator selling power on the open market in the MISO regional transmission organization territory.

“The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) has affirmed the need for NTEC to support additional renewable energy resources, while ensuring reliability is not compromised,” Mirasola said. “Dairyland is dedicated to providing sustainable, reliable and affordable power for our member cooperatives. NTEC will be a critical capacity resource to ensure reliable power for our members at a time when resource adequacy in the MISO region is declining significantly.”

Dairyland is made up of 24 member electric co-ops in southern Minnesota, western Wisconsin, northern Iowa, and northern Illinois, and also serves 17 municipal utilities. Rural cooperatives in theory provide their members more say in decisions than an investor-owned utility, but critics say that cooperative members that oppose more fossil fuel generation have not been heard.

Dairyland’s current power mix is about 52% natural gas and 48% coal, according to an analysis by the Sierra Club, which also found Dairyland could save members $55 million by retiring two coal plants and replacing them with renewables, without adding any new gas-fired generation.

“There’s a lot of hesitancy around clean energy because of misinformation from fossil fuel industry and lobbyists,” said Cassie Steiner, Wisconsin Sierra Club senior campaign coordinator. “Definitely we see some cooperative members bringing up those pieces of misinformation or viewing clean energy as a very politicized dichotomy, rather than something that is accessible, affordable, reliable. The frustrations we’re hearing are the member cooperatives maybe aren’t listening to clean energy advocates who are their members.”

One of those frustrated cooperative members is Dena Eakles, a writer and activist who runs organic Echo Valley Farm and a sustainability nonprofit in western Wisconsin. She is a member of Vernon Electric Cooperative, part of Dairyland, and she is upset that Vernon board members have not opposed the Nemadji Trail plan.

“To me, any kind of fossil fuel energy is not clean energy,” she said. “People just see the end result, my lights go on, my stove runs — everything’s hunky dory. We need more people to understand and put pressure on their own board. We just need to help each other understand the peril of this time.”

Advocates press Wisconsin regulators to reconsider natural gas plant need is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Tony Leys FORT DODGE, Iowa — Allison Roderick has a warning and a pledge for rural residents of her county: The water from their wells could be contaminated, but the government can help make it safe. Roderick is the environmental health officer for Webster County in north-central Iowa, where a few thousand rural residents live […]

The post Millions of rural Americans rely on private wells. Few regularly test their water. appeared first on Wausau Pilot & Review.

The state DOJ tracks police who leave employment with law enforcement agencies under negative circumstances. The Badger Project found these officers analyzing that database.

By Peter Cameron, THE BADGER PROJECT

Wandering officers, problem police who get fired or forced out from one department, then go work at another, are a problem across the country.

To help prevent these officers from bouncing between agencies, the Wisconsin Department of Justice maintains a database where law enforcement agencies can flag officers they fired or forced out. Police and sheriff’s departments can check the database when considering hiring a new officer.

Also, the Wisconsin State Legislature passed a law in 2021 that requires law enforcement agencies to maintain a work history file for each employee and creates a procedure for law enforcement agencies, jails, and juvenile detention facilities to receive and review an officer candidate’s file from previous employers.

Previously, some law enforcement agencies had agreed to seal a fired officer’s personnel file in exchange for leaving quietly, so potential law enforcement employers couldn’t see why the officer had left their last job.

Nearly 300 officers currently employed in the state were fired or forced out from previous jobs in law enforcement, according to data from the state DOJ that The Badger Project obtained through a records request.

The state of Wisconsin currently has about 15,000 certified active law enforcement officers, including jail officers, according to the state DOJ, so fired or forced-out officers make up nearly 2 percent of the total.

Some of those flagged officers were simply novices who didn’t perform at an acceptable level during their initial probationary period, when the bar to fire them is very low, experts say. Sometimes the bosses simply don’t like a new hire and want them gone. Or the officer couldn’t handle the high pressure of working in a busy urban area, and do better in slower-paced positions and agencies, says Steve Wagner, a longtime police officer in Racine who is now an administrator for the state DOJ.

But others lost their jobs for more negative reasons.

The Badger Project looked at the state DOJ’s database and found four officers working in northwestern Wisconsin who had been fired or forced out from another law enforcement agency. A fifth officer was forced out from a police department in the area and moved one county over to continue work in law enforcement.

All the officers were given the chance to comment for this story. Those who provided them were included.

Noah Bunt

• Shawano Police Department – May 2006 to November 2018
• Resigned prior to completion of internal investigation
• Now employed by Hurley Police Department

Bunt was accused of having a sexual relationship with another officer’s wife, and of communicating with her in a “sexual nature” while on duty with the Shawano Police Department, according to text messages collected from their phones.

Bunt was placed on administrative leave and resigned before the investigation concluded.

The Hurley Police Department hired Bunt on Nov. 30, 2018, 11 days after his last official day at the Shawano Police Department.

Hurley Police Chief Chris Colassaco and Bunt did not respond to messages seeking comment.

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Brittany Letica

• Superior Police Department – January 2021 until April 2022
• Resigned in lieu of termination
• Now employed by Bayfield County Sheriff’s Department

Letica “was released from probation” from the Superior Police Department because she was not meeting the standards of our department, said Assistant Police Chief John Kiel.

In an email to The Badger Project, Letica said she was “set up to fail from the beginning without any help from the department.”

“I was not treated fairly at this department and I realized, is this what I really want anyway?” she continued.

The Bayfield County Sheriff’s Office hired Letica in October 2022 as a full-time sheriff’s deputy.

Bayfield County Sheriff Tony Williams noted that Letica was hired before he became sheriff, but said she has “been doing great for us.”

The administration was aware of her exit from the Superior Police Department, and an “extensive background check” is conducted by the department’s investigator lieutenant before anyone is hired, Williams said.

“Deputy Letica is performing outstanding,” Williams said. “Deputy Letica is very professional and is fair with people, levelheaded and quick to respond to calls.”

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Damen Rankin

• Superior Police Department – April 2018 to January 2019
• Resigned in lieu of termination
• Now employed by UW-Superior Police Department

Rankin briefly worked for the Superior Police Department but “was released from probation because he was not meeting the standards of our department,” said Assistant Police Chief John Kiel.

The UW-Superior Police Department hired him to their five-officer staff in November 2020.

Jordan Milan, a spokesperson for UW-Superior, said she was not able to discuss “information gathered through the interview process,” but noted all applicants go through the same process of application review, interviews and reference checks.

“We conduct extensive background checks on all police officers, including physical and psychological assessments,” Milan said.

“Officer Rankin has met job performance expectations during his employment at UW-Superior,” she added.

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Jay Thums

• Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources – May 2016 to February 2022
• Terminated for Cause
• Currently employed by the Price County Sheriff’s Office

Thums started working for both the Wisconsin DNR and the Price County Sheriff’s Office in 2016. In February 2022, he was terminated from his limited-term position as a conservation officer with the DNR due to “failure to follow supervisory directive related to the use and parking of the department squad (vehicle) that you are assigned to use during your shift,” according to a letter he received from his supervisor that The Badger Project obtained through a records request.

Thums told The Badger Project in an email that the DNR supervisor had allowed several full-time officers to take their squad vehicles home, an exception to the department’s rules. He also said supervisors told him they terminated him because he continued to take his squad home after a warning, but Thums said he never received a warning.

Thums remains employed as a deputy with the Price County Sheriff’s Office.

About Thums, Sheriff Brian Schmidt said “his performance is good. He’s doing what we ask and doing his job. What’s expected of him.”

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Schuenemann, who is now working outside Price County, did not complete his probationary period with the Park Falls Police Department. In records obtained from the department in a records request, Schuenemann was reprimanded for not completing some reports, not completing reports in a timely manner, submitting reports with misspellings and other errors, missing a scheduled training session, and misusing department property.

Regarding the property issues, he lost control of a patrol vehicle and it slid off the road, taking him out of service until it could be towed back onto the road, according to the records, which note he may have been violating the law by driving too fast for conditions.. He also closed an automatic garage door on a vehicle, damaging the door.

The Three Lakes Police Department hired him in November of 2022.

“The Three Lakes Police Department is pleased that Officer Schuenemann has chosen to join the Three Lakes Police Department and look forward to his opportunity to join the Three Lakes community,” Police Chief Scott Lea said in an email to The Badger Project.

“Applicants that choose to apply to our agency are evaluated and vetted through the hiring process and determining the reasons for an officer leaving an agency are evaluated as part of the process,” the chief added.

In response to a question about Schuenemann’s job performance, Lea said his department “does not comment on employees.”

This story was funded in part by the Wirtanen Fund at the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation.

The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.

The post Four officers fired, forced out from law enforcement back on the job in NW Wisconsin first appeared on The Badger Project.

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Four officers fired, forced out from law enforcement back on the job in NW Wisconsin was first posted on October 17, 2023 at 10:03 am.

Damakant Jayshi Over objections from licensed child care providers, a Marathon County committee on Thursday passed a resolution that aims to cut child care support and also weaken oversight of small in-home child care providers by reducing regulations. The resolution, approved by the Extension, Education, and Economic Development Committee, not only seeks to prohibit using […]

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Reading Time: 7 minutes

Story highlights

• Telehealth is increasingly connecting Wisconsinites living in remote areas to health resources.
• Helping fuel that growth was the federal government’s COVID-19 Public Health Emergency declaration, which eased regulatory barriers that previously blocked telehealth access.
• The federal government ended its emergency declaration in May, leaving questions about how long some telehealth flexibilities will last.
• Gaps in broadband access continue to limit services in many rural communities.

This story is part of our series Unhealthy Wisconsin, which examines areas where Wisconsin falls short in well-being.

Marshfield Medical Center family nurse practitioner Brianna Czaikowski says telehealth appointments are a game-changer for some patients. But in serving a mostly rural community, Czaikowski often fights spotty connections and miscommunication when providing virtual care.

“They feel a lot that I’m talking over them, which sometimes I probably am because (of) the delay,” said Czaikowski, a doctor of nursing practice and pediatric urology specialist who sees patients as far away as Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. “You’re not getting that full connection.”

Fresh off a COVID-19 pandemic boom, telehealth is increasingly connecting Wisconsinites living in remote areas to a web of health resources. Telehealth claims in 2020 swelled to a 6.3% share of total claims in Wisconsin — an increase of more than 2,400% from the previous year, according to a report from the Wisconsin Health Information Organization. Some northern counties reported high gains compared with the rest of the state.

Helping fuel that growth is the federal government’s COVID-19 Public Health Emergency declaration, which eased regulatory barriers that previously blocked telehealth access. That included relaxing rules for certain prescriptions and changing regulations pertaining to appointments and reimbursement for those on Medicare or Medicaid.

But lingering gaps in broadband access continue to limit services in many rural communities, where telehealth use lags behind better-connected urban communities.

Meanwhile, the federal government ended its emergency declaration in May, leaving questions about how long some telehealth flexibilities will last. Legislation made some changes permanent, but others are set to expire by the end of 2024 or before.

Without action, some of the state’s most vulnerable patients could lose telehealth options they gained during the pandemic.

Pandemic actions expanded telehealth services 

After the COVID-19 pandemic struck in March 2020, the Biden administration announced initial telehealth flexibilities that Congress further expanded temporarily — igniting a 63-fold increase in Medicare patients seeking telehealth services that year, according to a federal Department of Health and Human Services report.

Pandemic-era changes, for instance, allowed all eligible Medicare providers to deliver telehealth services that patients could access in their home and outside of previously designated rural areas. The changes waived geographic restrictions on telehealth services and increased options to receive them.

The changes cleared a “huge hurdle” that previously blocked telehealth growth, said Mary DeVany, associate director for the Great Plains Telehealth Resource and Assistance Center.

The pandemic ushered in significant growth for telehealth services for behavioral and mental health. And it has also increased options for certain types of primary care, DeVany said. Remote patient monitoring software, for instance, allows doctors to keep tabs on weight, blood pressure and other vital signs for patients with chronic health conditions, meaning patients with chronic conditions need less frequent hospital or clinic visits.

Telehealth has its limitations. “We can’t see certain things that we could see in the office,” Czaikowski said. That could include immediately spotting signs of child abuse or diagnosing ailments that might not be on a patient’s radar.

But expanded telehealth options have proved “really beneficial” for Czaikowski’s patients in many ways. Although most of her patients still use in-person visits, she said, telehealth visits allow families to check in more often or get simple diagnoses without having to pull their kids out of school and drive long distances for a short in-person visit.

“I see people from Michigan,” Czaikowski said. “They have to drive six hours just to see me. And then to have a 10-minute visit and tell them that their kid is just constipated? Or that they wet the bed — okay, here’s your medicine. That’s a lot for the families to have to give up.”

Health care by phone and Zoom 

But not all telehealth options are equal — or accessible to all.

Czaikowski conducts telehealth appointments over video or phone. She prefers video appointments when possible, allowing her to see patients and keep their attention. But she said the majority of telehealth patients she treats rely only on phone calls. That’s in line with national trends among rural patients.

“People will call you from work or when they’re driving and not really give you their full attention,” Czaikowski said. “You have to be really talented in what questions you ask as a provider.”

While phone visits work well for those with less tech literacy or working parents with multiple kids at home, they reduce opportunities for children to communicate health information that parents might not think or want to mention, Czaikowski said.

“The kids tell the truth. When we’re on the (phone) visit, you don’t really hear the kids, it’s more the parent.”

Rural broadband access lags

Poor internet service ranks among the top reasons Czaikowski’s patients choose phone appointments over video, which generally should work at download speeds of 25 megabits per second and upload speeds of 3 Mbps — the federal standard for broadband access.

Nearly 22% of rural Wisconsinites lack adequate broadband services — a rate far above the rest of the state, according to a 2021 Federal Communications Commission report. And data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey show 38% of low-income households in Wisconsin lack an internet subscription.

State leaders are working on solutions.

In 2020 Democratic Gov. Tony Evers established the Governor’s Task Force on Broadband Access, which assists rural communities, many with older populations that want high-quality internet but don’t know where to start.

“They didn’t mind not having broadband, maybe they didn’t see the importance of it,” task force chair Chris Meyer said. “But as their communities age, telehealth suddenly becomes a reason.”

Telecommunications companies find it more lucrative to provide broadband to densely populated urban areas. For-profit businesses happily make the initial, and often heavy, infrastructure investment because they expect to have a large customer base.

But sparsely populated areas are less enticing for private companies. The cost of burying miles of fiber optic cables — one of the fastest and most reliable ways to deliver the internet — can be prohibitive. While a mile of internet service could serve hundreds of homes in a metropolitan area, it would cover only a few homes in northern Wisconsin, Meyer said.

Wisconsin has directed at least $340 million to broadband expansion and connected about 390,000 people to the internet since Evers launched the task force, Meyer said. The state had previously spent about $20 million.

Despite the task force’s increase in spending, Meyer said many people, especially those in northern Wisconsin, have yet to gain high-speed service.

Without broadband access, telehealth is “not a cure-all,” said Kirk Moore, Covering Wisconsin’s navigator who connects northern Wisconsinites to health insurance.

“Just to be able to take on the task of telehealth is a barrier.”

Meanwhile, low-income rural Wisconsinites may not make full use of the internet even after fiber optic cables arrive in their communities.

Rural households tend to earn less than urban households in Wisconsin, federal data show. And while a growing share of rural Wisconsinites own a computer, Moore said, “they have a computer but they don’t have the broadband access to be able to hook up to a physician or a behavioral health person through a video.”

Some telehealth flexibilities are temporary 

The federal government made some telehealth flexibilities permanent before the emergency declaration ended, particularly for those related to behavioral and mental health. Federally Qualified Health Centers and Rural Health Clinics, for instance, may continue providing such services to Medicare patients without previous geographic restrictions — including over audio-only platforms.

The government has extended similar flexibilities for issues unrelated to behavioral and mental health through only Dec. 31, 2024.

The Drug Enforcement Administration and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration additionally extended flexibilities for remote prescriptions of controlled medications, such as treatments for opioid use disorder, through Nov. 11, 2023. The deadline will extend an additional year for new practitioner-patient telemedicine relationships.

Financial incentives affected

The pandemic also affected how hospitals were reimbursed — and financially incentivized — to offer telehealth services.

Under the federal emergency declaration, Medicare and Medicaid in Wisconsin and most other states began reimbursing hospitals for telehealth visits at the same rate as in-person visits.

“That means if you are seen … for something that you would have had covered in person, you are seen for that through telehealth,” DeVany said.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services in March announced it would permanently reimburse hospitals for most video and audio telehealth services offered to the more than 1 million Wisconsinites on Medicaid — as long as the quality of virtual appointments matched in-person services.

The long-term future of reimbursements for telehealth services through Medicare remains less certain. Without further action, the equal treatment of telehealth and in-person services for billing will expire at the end of 2024.

At that point, Medicare could pay a lower rate for telehealth appointments — excluding the costs of items associated with in-person visits. That would require health care providers to absorb additional costs — or even eliminate services they can’t afford, DeVany said, adding that a similar result could happen with the private insurance market, which often follows Medicare’s lead.

“Once again, the patient would have to come and figure out how to come in,” DeVany said. “It’s a dual-edged sword, in that the patient gets the short end of that deal.”

A bipartisan group of dozens of lawmakers in Congress are pushing to make a range of pandemic-era telehealth flexibilities permanent.

“While telehealth use has skyrocketed these last few years, our laws have not kept up,” U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said in a June statement. “Telehealth is helping people in every part of the country get the care they need, and it’s here to stay.”

Czaikowski hopes Medicare continues covering telehealth appointments for specialists, which she said are in short supply across Wisconsin. She is among just six nurse practitioners statewide certified in urology, she said.

“They can’t just go to the doctor an hour away. They are traveling six hours,” Czaikowski said about some of her rural patients in Upper Michigan. “I really hope Medicare doesn’t ever take that away because it’s really going to hurt us.”

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Pandemic brings telehealth boom to rural Wisconsin, but barriers linger is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.