— Wyoming statewide, structural systems

A safety net with too many gaps.

Wyoming families are working hard. The public systems meant to help aren't keeping up, and the gaps show up as health outcomes as often as financial ones.

$62,000

What a Natrona County family needs to earn each year to make ends meet. Most public supports cut off well before that.

Wyoming Self-Sufficiency Standard, Wyoming Women's Foundation. [11] This figure connects to the poverty stats on Who Carries the Most Weight: 1 in 10 Natrona residents live below the federal poverty line, and many more fall below what it actually takes to get by here.

— What Wyoming residents told us
62%

Of Wyoming residents just getting by financially experienced mental health strain in the last year.

Financial strain and health strain arrive together. The gaps documented below are what keeps families in that position.

New Bridge Strategy Wyoming Statewide Survey, February 2026. Statewide, N=545. [17]

— The benefits cliff

Where help ends, and where stability actually starts.

A benefits cliff is what happens when a small raise costs someone more in lost public assistance than they gained in pay. A family can end up worse off for earning more, right up until they clear every program's cutoff and reach true self-sufficiency. That's the gap this ladder shows.

Drag the marker to see what a family loses as its income rises
130% FPL
1 of 4 supports has ended
SNAP
130%
Medicaid for children
133%
Section 8 housing
143%
WIC
185%
Self-sufficiency
239%
0% 65% 130% 260%

The axis above runs in percent of the federal poverty level. A family needs to reach 239% of it to be truly self-sufficient. The gap between where help ends and where stability starts is wide. [11]

— The programs that miss

Two ways to fall through.

Who isn't getting help they qualify for, and who falls through the cracks entirely.

Not getting what they qualify for

78%
Of SNAP-eligible Wyoming households don't receive SNAP. For households with someone over 60 or living with a disability, that number is 89%. [12]
19%
Of eligible Wyoming children are served through the state's childcare assistance program. [13]

The insurance gap

15,200
Wyoming residents fall into the insurance gap, earning too much for Medicaid but too little for marketplace subsidies. [16]
#46
Wyoming's national ranking in health care access and affordability. [15]
1 of 10
Remaining states without Medicaid expansion. [14]
— What families told researchers

Many families feel stuck in the middle, earning too much to qualify for help but not enough to cover the basics.

That gap shows up most sharply with health care, where a premium can cost more than the coverage is worth, forcing a choice between insurance and groceries, rent, or child care. In-person interviews scheduled during work hours, complicated paperwork, and systems that sometimes run only in English make it harder for families to use help they already qualify for. Shame compounds it: several described feeling embarrassed to accept support at all.

Paraphrased patterns from focus groups and interviews, April 2026. Not direct quotes from any individual. [18]

— Why the safety net has holes

Funding is shrinking on every level at once.

The gaps above aren't static.

Local
Natrona County is strained to meet its own statutory obligations and aging infrastructure needs. The county commission has already reduced the nonprofit carve-out of the county's long-standing self-imposed tax, and may eliminate it entirely next cycle, a cut that would hit organizations like the county's youth crisis center and family resource center directly. [1]
State
Wyoming remains one of the few states that hasn't expanded Medicaid, leaving many working individuals and families in a coverage gap with no path to insurance. [2]
Federal
Recent federal budget legislation has cut Medicaid and Medicare funding, effectively raising costs for low-income families, seniors, and people with disabilities. [3]
Private
Longtime private donors whose wealth traces back to the oil and gas industry are aging out, reducing the flow of private capital into community wellbeing just as public funding also contracts. [1]
— Voting and health
About 1 in 3
Voting-age Wyoming residents who cast a ballot in the August 2026 primary, where most Wyoming races are effectively decided. [5]

Researchers have found that communities with higher voter turnout have fewer chronic conditions, lower mortality rates, and better self-reported health. [4] Wyoming requires voters who register by mail to have their form notarized, one of several registration steps that fall hardest on residents with the fewest resources to spare. [5] Low participation means the people most affected by cuts to health and social services often have the least voice in decisions about them. Read more in The Civics Prescription, from our Root Causes series.

— The return on investment

The community pays for this either way.

$14
Saved in downstream medical and societal costs for every $1 spent on public health initiatives. [6]
$14.1T
The CDC's national estimate of what health problems linked to adverse childhood experiences cost each year in direct medical spending and lost healthy years of life. [7]

What it looks like locally

The same math holds at the scale of a single day, a single visit, a single year.

One day for one person
A day in the Natrona County jail
$147
One medical visit
A Level 4 emergency room visit, discounted cash price
$1,029
One year of a local diversion program
Jail days participants were ordered to serve in 2025
4,231

Jail costs about $147 a day to operate in Natrona County. [8] A standard Level 4 emergency room visit at a Casper health system runs $1,029 at the discounted cash price, and up to $2,450 at full list charge, for care that primary care could often have handled. [9] Participants in a local diversion program were ordered to serve 4,231 jail days in 2025. [10]

Why this belongs on this page specifically

The safety net gaps documented above, the benefits cliff, the SNAP gap, the insurance gap, aren't abstract policy problems. Every family who falls through one of them is a family more likely to end up needing the far more expensive version of help: an emergency room, a shelter bed, a jail cell. The community pays for these problems either way. The question this page is really asking is whether that payment happens on the cheap end or the expensive end.

A stronger safety net doesn't happen by accident.

The Trust is looking closely at where it can help close these gaps, more on that soon.

Natrona Collective Health Trust

Sources

Numbers are cited inline above with bracketed numbers. This list gives the full source behind each one.

  1. Community partner interviews, February 2026, local funding context
  2. KFF, State Health Facts, status of Medicaid expansion decisions
  3. FSG analysis, Workshop 1 strategic planning pre-read, March 2026, federal funding changes
  4. RWJF, voter turnout and health outcomes research
  5. WyoFile, via Oil City News, citing Wyoming Secretary of State data, August 2026, primary turnout; Wyoming Secretary of State, mail-in voter registration requirements
  6. Families USA and Pew Research, 2025, public health return on investment
  7. Christopher Peterson, Missy V. Aslam, Phyllis H. Niolon, et al., "Economic Burden of Health Conditions Associated With Adverse Childhood Experiences Among US Adults," JAMA Network Open (2023), as cited by the CDC
  8. Local program cost data (jail and sober-living costs), as cited in the Trust's "Show Your Work" series, post 6
  9. Banner Health hospital price transparency file and Banner Medical Group Direct Pay Pricing, both accessed 2026
  10. Rocket Docket program data, NCSJ, 2025, as cited in the Trust's "Show Your Work" series, post 6
  11. Wyoming Self-Sufficiency Standard, 2024, Wyoming Women's Foundation
  12. Wyoming SNAP Gap, 2024, Wyoming Community Foundation
  13. First Five Years Fund, 2025
  14. KFF Medicaid Expansion Fact Sheet, Wyoming
  15. Commonwealth Fund, State Health System Performance Scorecard, Wyoming
  16. U.S. Census Bureau
  17. New Bridge Strategy Wyoming Statewide Survey, Feb. 2026, statewide sample, N=545
  18. Focus group and interview takeaways, Natrona Collective Health Trust strategy phase II, April 2026, internal document, no public link