This year, West Virginia lawmakers made significant changes to drug and alcohol treatment programs funded by Medicaid, which many people use. The new legislation ties Medicaid payments to patient outcomes rather than the number of patients served.

The Mountain State has the nation's highest overdose rates, and overdose death rates among Black residents exceed those of any other group. In this episode of Us & Them, host Trey Kay learns how Medicaid funding supports organizations working in recovery and what that work looks like on the ground.

This episode of Us & Them, recently honored with a Regional Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, is presented with support from The Greater Kanawha Valley Foundation.

Daniel Johnston, a visual artist and singer-songwriter from West Virginia made his mark in the indie music scene of the1980s. His raw and unpolished style earned him a label as an outsider artist, and a place in the state’s Music Hall of Fame. Johnston recorded his best-known songs on cassette in his parents’ basement in Hancock County. Songwriters saw past the lo-fi production values and musicians like Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain championed his work. Johnston was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in his 20s, and as his fame grew, his mental health struggles increased. He died in 2019 at age 58, leaving hundreds of songs and drawings. In this award-winning episode of Us & Them, host Trey Kay talks with family members, musicians and others about Daniel’s life and legacy.

Hundreds of thousands of kids rely on America’s foster care system. West Virginia has the highest rate of foster care placements of any state - four times the national average. Foster care is most often needed because of parental substance use, mental health challenges, poverty and neglect. Six-thousand Mountain State kids are in foster care, but there’s a shortage of licensed foster homes and residential facilities and that’s why nearly 400 kids live in out-of-state institutions. On this Us & Them, an encore episode finds more than half of all states have seen their number of licensed foster homes drop, some by as much as 60 percent because many new foster parents don’t stay in the system for long.

While official foster care cases are tracked and overseen by state agencies, many types of so-called kinship care are not official or included in state data.